Wanda picked Paris as “a country known for its breathtaking scenery” during the final minutes of this game show. Her sister Lissette picked Paris, too, and then changed her answer to London.

Sigh. I suppose I should be reassured that they both got zero points. But I have taught children who thought they lived in the country of Waukegan, deep inside the mysterious continent of Illinois. We need to begin to teach geography again, and not just state capitols.

When Wanda and Lissette are ready to go to Paris, Dublin, or Vienna, I’d like our citizens to seem a wee bit more ready for Prime Time.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

~ Philip K. Dick (1928 – 1982), “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t
Fall Apart Two Days Later”, 1978

The following is taken from a PowerPoint by a school identified for ultimate sanctions under No Child Left Behind. The school has been taken over by the state. I used to work there. Will the below plan work?

Eduhonesty: I must express a few concerns.

Certainly, all schools should focus on measuring learning results. All district departments should work together to make changes needed to improve student learning. Goals should be based on what students need to know for success, and those goals should not be stagnant.

That said, I just lived through this plan. I had a compliant administrator who did what he was told. In my view, what he did often lacked common sense, but no one up the ladder appeared to be available to listen to my observations.  I believe my problem came down to point five: “Willing to make more dramatic changes to help children learn — even if teachers, parents or others disagree.”

But what if those teachers, parents or others have valid concerns? What if they are even right sometimes? I swear, every time I brought up a concern last year, I was brushed off. Abruptly. Immediately. At worst, I was criticized for not being with the program and for lacking faith in my students.

The program had me handing obligatory tests and quizzes to my students at least once a week — often tests and quizzes that I had minimal or NO hand in writing and often tests or quizzes that my students could not do. I knew they were struggling. I had to grade those messes. Expecting students who are operating at a test-documented, first- to fifth-grade level in mathematics to succeed at those quizzes would have been showing more faith than any rationale person ought to possess. Did that compliant administrator ever look at those tests? If so, what was he thinking? Was he thinking at all?

Don’t get me wrong. I believe in faith. I am currently wearing a silver cross I purchased in Scotland, and I am not wearing it to ward off vampires. But faith should not override reason in the classroom.

I will cynically admit that I have my own version of faith in that compliant administrator; I trust him to spout the testing party-line without ever taking a real look at the students in his care. He will do what people tell him to do. And I’m not sure that he is ignoring inconvenient facts. I am afraid the situation may be scarier than that. I think he may have no idea that you can’t consistently give students material that’s sometimes four or even more years above their operating academic level and expect them to succeed — not without much more remediation than a few hours of essentially optional tutoring each week.

Well, hugs to my colleagues in the trenches. To any of you who can identify with what I just wrote, I extend my profound sympathies. I’m not sure I have any real advice other than to nod, agree, and teach like your hair’s on fire. Trying to explain never got me anywhere, probably because my advocacy for less dramatic changes did not fit with the program. Readers, I hope you are doing better.

I just read an article that complains that disadvantaged children (undefined in the article) do not receive access to math classes of the same rigor as their more advantaged counterparts. I am certain this is true. Lower-income students often encounter weaker content.

My concern is contained in various previous posts. Sometimes this weaker content comes as a direct response to students’ operational academic levels. Sometimes this content may also be the appropriate choice for students who have fallen behind.

This last year, my lower-income, language-challenged, bilingual students were forced to take on more rigorous math. All students in my school, whether bilingual, special ed or “regular” took exactly the same quizzes and tests. The more mathematically apt gained a fair amount of knowledge, even as they took frequent hits to their self-esteem. But my lowest kids spent the year getting clobbered. I’ll acknowledge that if my students had seen that rigorous content in earlier grades, we would not have been in the mess we were in. When thirteen-year-old students can’t add fractions or convert a decimal to a percentage without days of remedial work, something has gone badly wrong in elementary school.

But you can’t just dramatically up the rigor of the material to fix the problem. When you do, you see answers like the following:

I managed to give a point of partial credit on the last answer at least.

(More management advice as we move toward the antsy days of winter. Please pass this one to newbies.)

I took my elderly parents to Arbys recently. We sat near two women with three kids, a couple of friends out for a family lunch. One kid complained about mom telling him to keep his sandwich together while he ate. I liked her response.

“Well, I understand your feelings,”she said’ “but I make the rules.”

No hedging, no discussion, no negotiation. You can’t smear your cheese around. You also have to pick up after yourself at the end.

I liked mom’s attitude. She seemed entirely calm, relaxed. The family structure was not a democracy. The kids still seemed to have a fun lunch within the prescribed limits. Lunch was a win for the moms, kids and all the people in the restaurant. Future patrons won’t have to clean random cheese smears out of their clothes.

Those kids should also be easy to teach.

Eduhonesty: Firm, loving parents tend to produce successful students. All kids are different. Some can be more challenging to teach and to parent. But “I make the rules” establishes a helpful framework for parents and teachers. Teachers may wish to talk about rules at the start of the year and current fashion has students helping determine those rules, a good policy when enough critical discussion about the rules leads kids to know why they are doing what they are doing.

But once the rules are in place, you will want to avoid interchanges with students about whether or not those rules are fair, desirable, applicable to the current situation, etc.

“I make the rules.” You can say that. Or “I understand your feelings, but I must enforce our rules. We have a lot to learn today and we can’t bog down here.”

Your classroom, your rules, your rodeo.

If an errant student still wants to smear cheese, you should call home and apply an immediate penalty. Many teachers get tired in November as the days get shorter and colder, and the honeymoon period from the start of the year fades away. That tiredness can lead to apathy where the cheese in concerned. What’s a little cheese? You might think, while busily planning your next activity. But don’t turn your back on the cheese! You have to keep the cheese inside the bun. If not, you will be fighting cheese smears all year.

A catchphrase like “My classroom, my rules, my rodeo,” can help. Your phrase is shorthand for the more inflammatory, “I am in charge here.” An added, “We have a lot to learn!” puts the big issue out on the table. Praise the student who gets back on task. But get that student back on task. Moving a student to a desk near you or to a desk away from other students often helps.

You will be much happier in February if you make your stand now.

BEWARE!

(Break for a teaching tip for newbies. If classroom management has begun to seem tricky, this post may help.)

That Principal who threw out all the teachers’ desks in her Brooklyn school?* She had an attack of the wacky that day. Maybe she had been pushed over the edge, though, as she peered into classrooms and watched seated teachers whose students did not appear to be working. Students will take advantage of teachers who sit at desks for too long.

Your students need to know you are always available and always alert. (Or trying to be available and alert anyway. If I have ever had a teaching day when I fully hit this target, I’m sure I was too busy watching students to notice.) The learning that takes place in a classroom is related to the distance between you and your students. When you are readily available to students, learning will increase in subtle ways. The shy kid who will not raise a hand or walk to the front of the room may ask questions if you happen to be near her desk. The disruptive kid who wants to tell everyone about mom’s new boyfriend may get back to work if you are standing too near the gory details of her story. I recommend monitoring student progress by circulating throughout the room. Your desk should be a place to take attendance and set up instruction, but once class launches, you should move into the room and stand close to your kids.

During daily work, you can then give immediate feedback and catch misunderstandings before they become entrenched, repeated errors. During presentations, your nearby presence will increase attention. During testing, your wanderings will keep cell phones from sneaking out of pockets and secret lists from being stashed inside desks.

Wanderings also allow for those short chats that build relationships. A short, “Did your brother win his soccer game last night?” or “Does your ankle feel better?” can gain you good will that translates into better classroom behavior in the long-run. The key with these chats will be getting in and getting out. Classroom learning time cannot be sacrificed to lengthy social moments. One technique is to ask your personal question, listen attentively to the answer, maybe add a few comments, and then immediately ask another question related to the classwork.

“Six goals? Awesome. His team seems to be having a great year.” You point at the activity sheet. “Do you know what to do with the three-fourths in this denominator? Exactly. Great. Why did you decide to do that?”

Eduhonesty: By November, new teachers can feel neck deep in alligators. If you are feeling that way, ask colleagues for help. In any case, don’t let discouragement drive you toward your desk, towards separating yourself from the kids in the classroom. The more you connect with your kids, the easier classroom management will become.

*http://nycrubberroomreporter.blogspot.com/2015/10/ps-24-principal-donna-connelly-throws.html

When administrators and government officials look for the top-secret, Core-aligned magic that will somehow enable academically-lower children to catch up in the learning game, we all lose. Academically- and financially-disadvantaged children who have only three-fifths as many vocabulary words at their disposal as the “average” kid cannot catch up using any secret, as-yet-unidentified sorcery disguised as “best practices.” The targets those administrators and officials are trying to hit are not standing still. Kids with bigger vocabularies are simultaneously embarked upon their own learning adventures — and they are learning new material faster due to the greater ease with which they can read and interpret written text.

No academic alchemy can solve the problem created by those vocabulary deficits. Leveling the playing field requires extra instructional time for students who have fallen behind. Those students may need another one or two hours a day in school as well as a longer school year. While exact hours will vary, no substitute exists for instructional time.

Eduhonesty: If we are serious about fixing the educational inequities in America’s educational system, we must find the resources necessary to create those longer days and extra weeks.

I’d like to suggest that readers find “This column’s for all the Charlie Brown kids” by Leonard Pitts Jr. The column has almost nothing to do with education, but it’s a blast of hope for our quiet kids, our awkward, bookish, introverted and shy kids, the kids who, in Pitt’s words, eat lunch alone. Pitts captures those kids marvelously.

Pitt’s column would make great reading for a diversity lesson. Our quiet kids need support. They need to understand that quiet and introverted are perfectly fine, a lesson that can get lost if we push too hard to force class participation. A happily-ever-after story for the right quiet kid might make his or her whole year better.

Eduhonesty: Hope — nothing we offer in the classroom matters more.

(You can put “This column’s for all the Charlie Brown kids” by Leonard Pitts Jr. in the Google bar.)

(For new readers, I am convinced that the only realistic way to pull up our lower-performing districts involves running longer school years and longer school days for students who are performing significantly below grade level. No substitute exists for teaching time. We have been frantically looking for that substitute, that piece of pedagogical magic, and we still are not closing the gap in any meaningful way between our best and worst schools.)

This graph sums up the problem with trying to expand the school year to offer more academic time to those students who have fallen behind. I am very familiar with insolvency. I watched for years as my district begged, borrowed and stole its way to putative solvency. I watched as the state threatened to take us over and told us not to issue bonds that the Board decided to issue anyway. I watched as the state fired the Board and took over. I watched as administrators were arrested. Finances were far from the only district problem the state wanted to address, but finances helped put the district on the radar, largely because we blithely ran in the red, year after year.

As I study the California insolvency graph above and other similar charts, my data crystallizes into one solid realization: We cannot reform school performance without reforming school funding. Too many districts are running near the edge and pulling out their credit card when they can’t pay all the bills. The following examples may be particularly egregious examples of misuses of funds, but my graph above makes clear that insolvency has become far from rare.

ILLINOIS MOVES TO DISBAND TWO LOCAL SCHOOL BOARDS — The Illinois State Board of Education is moving to dissolve two local school boards in historically low-performing districts. East St. Louis School District 189 and North Chicago School District 187 are both slated to have their boards removed due to poor academic performance and corrupt leadership. The East St. Louis district has not made adequate yearly progress in nine years—or for almost as long as that has been a federal requirement—and has a $12.5 million budget deficit. In North Chicago, the federal government charged the local district board’s ex-president with taking more than $800,000 in bribes from bus companies. She is currently serving time in a federal prison for a multi-state Internet fraud conviction. Under Illinois law, the State Board of Education or state superintendent can remove a local board if the district does not make sufficient yearly progress for seven consecutive years. Upon the removal of the boards, the state will appoint a new panel to take over all school matters until academic benchmarks are met. The current local boards may appeal the respective takeover decisions to the State Board of Education. Sources: Belleville News-Democrat (4/21/12), Quincy Journal (4/25/12) (http://www.nasbe.org/uncategorized/headline-review-april-23-27/)

Eduhonesty: This post has not even touched upon the inequities created by property-tax based funding, but that funding system results in large gaps in per pupil spending between districts. Federal and state bureaucracies then try to patch the system with complicated grants and loans. We can do better.

Again, zip code should not be destiny.

If you read the last post, please reread. I spent some time clarifying my issues and connections. The post has changed substantially. Thank you, all of you. The Top Secret Blog of Gloom and Doom now has well over 11,000 subscribers. Go figure. I ought to try to include something funny for a break.

Walking into a classroom today?

BY SEAN ROBINSON
srobinson@thenewstribune.com

Editor’s note: Compiled from reports to Tacoma police. Taken from the Tacoma News Tribune police beat article.

Nov. 9: Spatters of blood covered the principal’s shirt and shoes.

The school resource officer at Oakland Alternative School, answering a panicked radio call, asked what was going on. The principal said he’d just broken up a fight between two students. One had a bloody nose.

The principal said he noticed the two students confronting each other outside and ordered them into the main office. As they walked in, the fight started. One boy, 17, took another boy, 16, to the ground and started throwing punches.

The principal pulled the attacking boy away and stowed the boys in separate rooms.

The officer spoke to the younger, bloody-nosed boy first. The boy didn’t want to say anything at first.

He said he wasn’t a gangster, but his friends were, and so was the older boy. He said the older boy came at him, started talking trash, tried to pick a fight and sucker-punched him.

HE SAID HE WASN’T A GANGSTER, BUT HIS FRIENDS WERE, AND SO WAS THE OLDER BOY. HE SAID THE OLDER BOY CAME AT HIM, STARTED TALKING TRASH, TRIED TO PICK A FIGHT AND SUCKER-PUNCHED HIM.

The boy wouldn’t say anything else. He wouldn’t say what the trash talk was about.

The officer spoke to the other boy, who said even less.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” the boy said.

The officer relayed the story he’d heard. Was that true?

“I don’t know,” the boy said.

Did he throw the first punch?

“Yep.”

The officer told the boy he was under arrest for misdemeanor assault. The boy stayed calm.

The officer spoke to the boy’s mother. She said her son had said a rival gang was after him, believing he was the gunman in a recent shooting in Tacoma’s Salishan area. The mother believed that was the basis for the fight at the school.

The officer booked the boy into Remann Hall, adding a charge of marijuana possession after staffers found a packet of pot in the boy’s shoe.

Read more here: http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/crime/article44918637.html#storylink=cpy

A perusal of the same newspaper has other articles about schools. In one, we are told that police are looking for a Foss High School student who apparently pointed a gun at another student on Monday. It’s not clear exactly where the incident happened, but the school went into lockdown.

Eduhonesty: I taught in an alternative high school some years ago. I remember the police dogs coming in. I remember students discussing eating their marijuana. In a pinch, humans can eat dried grass, no problem. This article has so much content that needs exploring but I think I’ll stick with one aspect of the academic crisis referred to in this article, the crisis of gangs and violence in our schools in a time when teacher evaluations are heavily based on student behavior. In particular, I fear a brain-drain that I am watching from the sidelines.

(Click to enlarge pictures.)

Teacher evaluations based on a common rubric like the sample above are inherently unfair. That sample is only a small part of a large rubric that can result in a more than twenty-page evaluation. I have one somewhere. The standard evaluation in Illinois has become huge, so huge that at times its accuracy must be suspect. In an hour, no administrator can observe all 20-some pages worth of behaviors. Admin can put “not observed” but I know that some administrators are “inferring” as they decide to score categories they have not specifically observed.

How does the rubric work? In a system commonly used by districts, a teacher would receive 1 – 4 points in each category in an evaluation, so my snippet above would be worth from 3 – 12 points depending on an observers view of behaviors in the classroom.

Administrators in alternative schools understand an alternative high school is a different animal, so I am not concerned about that alternative school as much as I am concerned about teachers in “feeder” schools. Some schools supply a higher percentage of students expelled for weapons, drugs and other offenses. Some schools contain many more gang members than others, gang members regularly attending classes where they are setting up the marijuana etc. sales that supply the gang with revenue. When expectations for teachers in those schools are the same as they are for teachers in middle class schools with limited or no gang activity, teachers in gang-infested schools end up being trapped and potentially set up to fail.

I’d like to ask readers to pause to consider how heavily the category of student participation might be affected by numbers of gang members in a classroom. Then think about how much better participation might be (on average) in a classroom filled with college-bound students.

In earlier times, when teachers were assessed based on their own efforts and performance, with an understanding of urban challenges, the system worked. Now, student behavior and class performance have become a heavy component of many evaluations and teachers are at a disadvantage when they choose to work in urban or disadvantaged areas. Teachers lose points for student misbehavior or off-task behavior, reducing evaluation scores. How might a teacher manage that problem of detached students? The problem of students who have gone to school mostly to sell drugs?

Here’s my take: If I had started working in these times, I’d have moved out of disadvantaged schools almost immediately and never gone back. When student behavior determines a large percentage of an overall evaluation, the best tactical move is to seek a school with students who intend to go on for further education, a school usually found higher up the socioeconomic ladder. Those schools pay better and now they frequently result in higher evaluations, since college-bound students are more likely to demonstrate the behaviors that give high points on the teacher evaluations.

The category “student participation” only forms part of the picture. Student interest and participation will also affect questions formed and asked. “Discussion techniques” and “quality of questions” will also be affected by class composition. If I have a class that is academically very low, I have to ask simpler questions more often. If nothing else, I will be asking these questions to prime the questioning pump, to get students to begin to answer questions so that I can go on to harder questions once the discussion develops momentum. In a stronger class, I might be able to leap straight into the deep, critical thinking questions, but I know from experience that providing academically-lower classes with a few “wins” before I move into the tougher questions works better than a nonstop stream of complex demands. I risk losing evaluation points now if I start with those simpler questions, though.

I understand the rationale for including student responses in evaluation rubrics. Still, when student responses become a heavy determinant in evaluations, the smart move has to be leaving our academically-weakest schools. The high schools where I live send more than 90% of their students to college. Those classes will contain higher levels of academic motivation overall than classes in gang-heavy neighborhoods where student preoccupations with safety and survival, not to mention drug revenues, may sometimes trump academics.

What’s the effect of student-based performance evaluations on staffing? I talked to a former colleague a few weeks ago.

“Oh, (my still withheld name!),” she said, “they are all new. All of the old teachers are gone. It is lonely.”

My colleague is putting in one more year before she retires. Many colleagues shifted to other teaching jobs last year. They moved socioeconomically up when they could and, if not, to higher paying districts. A number retired earlier than they had intended.

The young, smiling faces in my old school seem quite likable. I went to visit a few weeks ago. But I talked to a younger colleague who mentioned the existence of a problem they keep running into now at the school. An enormous amount of specific knowledge has walked out the door. The people who know the details of giving certain tests and managing certain procedures? In some cases, most or even all of them have left.

When my colleague above finishes her last, lonely year and retires, she will take with her an in-depth understanding of the science standards, equipment, and procedures that no one else possesses. She has also run a horticulture project almost entirely on her own, finding the materials — often paying for them herself — and teaching students how to raise vegetables and household plants. During holiday seasons, students sold what they grew, subsidizing new materials purchases. That project is only peripherally in the curriculum. Many students loved growing flowers and vegetables, but when my friend leaves, those florae are likely to become part of the past. Who will step up for all the unpaid, time-consuming work that project requires? My colleague’s extra work might be worth a couple of “professional responsibility” points on the twenty-page evaluation, but it’s basically a labor of love by a woman who loves to teach and never expected to be rewarded.

My colleague might have stayed longer in a more-supportive environment, an environment that did not include an evaluation system that many older teachers regard as a “gotcha” of sorts. They remember when the feedback they received felt mostly appreciative and positive. Now, they receive page after page of well-meaning suggestions for improvement. Even when a teacher gets a “3,” meaning he or she is proficient, suggestions for improvement may be included in final paperwork.

The rubric referred to above is not national, but affects millions of teachers. Other states have other rubrics. The larger problem lies in the fact that evaluations are now being used primarily as teacher-improvement tools. I suggest that we decouple evaluations and improvement – creating two separate systems, one to be used to improve pedagogy and one to evaluate teachers. Otherwise, smart teachers will head to districts that will provide them with more positive feedback — districts with stronger student participation and more motivated student behavior.

Or they will just quit.