I have data from last year. I have lots of data, almost all of it from math or language arts. The question that bothers me is this one: Where is my science data? I taught science last year. I attended regular, weekly meetings for science. We planned and executed common instruction. But I collected almost no data.

No one cared. No one demanded that data. My fellow science teachers and I had a fine year and I frankly didn’t and don’t miss the data. You don’t always need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and I’d say our understanding of how instruction had worked was mostly spot on.

Eduhonesty: That said, I am afraid that the absence of that data reflects an unfortunate narrowing of the curriculum on the part of a school district trying desperately to raise scores on the annual state test. We ought to care about science. We ought to care about social studies. We ought to care about Spanish, art and health. The fight to raise test score numbers has been diminishing schools’ focus on lightly-tested or untested subjects that deserve their place in the sun.

Commentators lately have focused on the lack of urban and financially-disadvantaged students pursuing stem careers. I’d say, given the amount of attention given to science in my disadvantaged middle school last year, I may know part of the reason. English and math simply shoved science aside.

(Another set of tips for those who are getting a little desperate for time. Please pass this on to anyone you think might benefit.)

A somewhat crazed-sounding principal in the Bronx recently threw out her teachers’ desks and filing cabinets. She did not want teachers sitting at their desks during class and she solved that problem with one fascinating swoop. Last I heard, the district had reclaimed the desks and they had been stacked in the basement. Check out the pictures.
(http://nypost.com/2015/10/18/principal-forbid-teachers-to-sit-so-she-threw-out-their-desks/)

Overall, I don’t approve. Teachers manage a great deal of paperwork, including classwork, homework, tests, quizzes, data derived from class tests and quizzes, professional development materials, school and district reports, attendance forms, letters, printed mail, printed emails, announcements, future assignments, other teachers’ great ideas, and vital items such as inhalers. I don’t see how a classroom can function efficiently with no teacher desks. Even with filing systems, some days I missed a beat or two, and forgot an assembly reminder or dress code letter that was supposed to go home.

Still, I think that principal might have had something when she threw out the filing cabinets. Efficiency experts estimate that anywhere from 80% to 95% of materials that go into those cabinets never come out. Roach motels should work as well. Papers get lost in filing cabinets, buried in “C” when they should have been in “H.” Failed test forms are put away for reviews that never happen. Possible future lesson materials are buried in piles that surface after their related topic has ended.

This post is for all my readers who are losing papers. It’s also for readers who are regularly digging in and (re)arranging those filing cabinets. How much time do you spend finding or sorting papers? Or worse, rearranging filing cabinet dividers to make your life “easier” and “more manageable.” Here are a few tips to help:

♦ Keep your filing cabinet categories simple. Some possible categories: Tests and quizzes, data (create a separate folder for each class), professional development, parent communications, copies of used assignments for next year, meetings, attendance (if you don’t have or can’t trust your district attendance program), parent-teacher conference night, and IEPs/student needs.

Here’s where the filing process gets tricky. Who are you? Are you the sort of person who rifles through the filing cabinet regularly? If so, you can probably safely add a fair number of additional categories into those metal drawers. But filing cabinets, like purses, tend to be black holes for many people. If you are not a person who peruses filing cabinets, you may want to avoid big, metal boxes. Don’t stuff your great ideas in there. Don’t store reports you need to finish later or announcements that need to go out in the near future. Don’t bury future assignments!

♦ Find shelving that won’t disappear from view.

O.K., I freely admit my blue box from last year looks rather battered and unimpressive now. That box worked great for me, though. I could keep the box by my desk in easy view. I did not store everything there. The finished tests were going into the big metal filing cabinets, for example. I used the blue box for items like make-up assignments and tests (MU) and other papers I might want to grab quickly. I used it for information on the new software program that I could get around to filing later. I used it for temporary storage for impending events, such as parent-teacher night information, and field trip permission trip forms.

♦ I suggest choosing a day each month to stay late for filing. If this task takes more than an hour, you are overthinking your filing or saving too much stuff. If your blue box categories mostly match your filing cabinet categories, you should be able to finish the month’s filing in a few minutes.

♦ I like alphabetizing my filing. Some people prefer color coding. Whatever works best for you, create a system. File papers you expect to use in the next week or two in your handy, blue box. When papers pile up on shelves and counters, teachers sometimes lose necessary papers inside the bigger forest of climbing, white piles. The blue box prevents that.

One caveat: Because this box is easy to get in and out of, you should not store IEP and other confidential materials here.

Eduhonesty: By now, some starting teachers are adding up dollar signs. After all, I just suggested you buy an industrial stapler. If your incidental expenses have begun to feel painful, the right cardboard box will work just fine. You do want a box with a lid, but you could even make that lid. We teachers tend to be naturals at arts and crafts. If not, we keep gluing anyway.

Important note: I just added a caveat to my stapler post from yesterday. Many industrial staplers exist. You want to find a stapler like the one I used and showed in my preceding post. The wrong industrial stapler makes it too easy for Johnny to staple Freddy.

(Another organizational tip for newbies and anyone else who is interested)

This quick tip can make your life unimaginably easier.

Buy one of those industrial staplers, the kind that can staple thirty-some papers into one stack. You will have to buy the special staples that go with your new stapler. Yes, these staplers are expensive. You should stash this stapler so the kids don’t damage it or, worse, staple their own thumbs. Kids can do the darnedest stuff.

(One important caveat: I picked this stapler because no one can easily stable their thumb or another student’s head with this model. Other industrial staplers offer much less protection. If you are going to keep your new stapler in the classroom, even if you intend to keep it inside your desk, you need to avoid models that might lead to trouble. Choose carefully. A stapler that looks like the traditional stapler will be your best bet.)

When you pick up the homework papers from the class inbox, staple them into one group. Among other problems solved, when a kid says, “I turned it in so you must have lost it,” you will be able to immediately address that issue. If it’s in the packet, he turned it in. If not, tell him to check his locker and show him the packet.

(Incidentally, if you are using one inbox, I recommend you go buy a few more cheap, black plastic boxes. Each class should have its own box.)

Grading will often be easier if all the papers are attached to one another, especially with preprinted worksheets. Packets save paper-handling time. Just flip the page and keep flipping.

You might want to alphabetize those papers before you staple them. Papers that won’t be entered into a database obviously don’t need alphabetizing, but if you are going to be plunking numbers into some grading program or spreadsheet, alphabetizing saves oodles of time in the long run. You should be able to blast through entering alphabetized, stapled grades.

Eduhonesty: Kudos to Michael Stewart who gave me this tip during my first year teaching. If you have small classes or that industrial stapler costs too much, you can get by with a regular, cheaper model and multiple small packets, but I love my industrial stapler. Whatever stapler you use, keeping papers together will simplify your life. I also recommend a special dedicated bag for homework papers– the homework goes in the Elmo bag, for example — and another bag for other papers. The objective is to never lose a homework paper ever and, with the right system, you should be able to make that happen.

(More advice for newbies. This is for newbies who are getting assigned homework back. The amount of homework that comes back varies considerably from district to district. Please share this post with middle school and high school teachers especially.)

Did you spend the week-end surrounded by stacks of papers? Are student pages covered with your comments? Did you grade endlessly through the World Series? Or maybe even grade in the car while someone else drove? I remember those days.

Here are a few tips for strategically planning homework assignments:

♦ Before making the assignment, ask yourself: Do I want to grade problems 1 through 34? Do my students need to do all 34 problems? Consider assigning the odd or even numbers instead.

♦ Even if your students are assigned all 34 problems — you may believe they need the practice and hopefully that’s your call — consider grading only a subset of those problems. If you do this, I suggest breaking up classes into separate piles. In a class of thirty students, for example, make 5 piles or papers. For the first pile, grade problems one through seven, for the second pile grade problems eight through fifteen, etc. You want to grade all the problems so you can see where the class had difficulty, but you don’t want to grade every single problem. In an ideal universe, you might grade every problem, you and your three clones on the couch beside you, but in the real world 34 times 120 equals 4,080 problems to grade. If you do this nightly, you will eventually burn out. In fact, you may flame out before the year’s over.

If some piles have lower scores due to tougher problems, curve your results.

Language, studies and science students tend to have fewer problems but often more involved problems. Again, don’t grade them all. Look for samples to use. Your goal is to understand where your students need more help by the time you finish grading. You don’t need to look at the entire contents of every paper to figure that out.

♦ Learn to “scan” papers, glancing over them quickly to spot trouble. Grade a few papers completely and carefully. Then scan the rest, making a mark to indicate trouble as you go. Do it fast. Try to set a deadline if that works for you and does not stress you out. Tell yourself that all of 3rd period has to be done in one-half hour, for example.

♦ Don’t sweat the points too much. Who cares if Xavier got a 7 or an 8? In the end, small point differences will average out by the quarter’s end. Give Xavier the higher score and move on.

♦ Identify students who look at the homework and study your corrections. I recommend spending more time on those papers. If Jasmine studies your feedback, taking a few extra minutes on her paper makes sense.

♦ Identify students who are going to look at the final number and just toss the paper. I’d talk to those students to try to get them to take advantage of grading, but some kids only care about the number on top. Frankly, your helpful comments will be mostly wasted on them. Scan through those papers fast and move on.

♦ Ask students where they had trouble before you start grading. At the start of class or when you pick up papers, ask the class which homework problems were hardest. Those are the problems you will want to grade with more care. If the answers seem to be a hopeless mess, that’s where the review session begins.

♦ Don’t be too helpful. (What??!?) I know that may sound wrong, but I believe fewer comments often lead to more learning. If you put nine comments on a page, the most important ones may get lost. Too much feedback and kids tend to shut down or have difficulty sorting out what they need to learn. For single paragraph openers or exit slips, for example, I’d recommend no more than three comments or corrections. Let a few imperfections slide and focus on what most matters. I might look at a paragraph and write, “Remember to capitalize cities!” along with one or two other observations and then let other flaws pass for later. In my experience, one or two exclamation points will be noticed and remembered.

♦ If you know you can’t get through the grading that night, break up grading into small groups and do part of the grading. You want to know where students are struggling. You will also thank yourself come the week-end if you have half that day’s grading done rather than none. A small pile each day is enough to get a feel for how well your lesson went and for the material you may need to review before moving on.

♦ If you are falling behind regularly, consider grading homework in class. Let students grade the homework for you. This provides immediate reinforcement for right and wrong answers. Students benefit from seeing what went wrong the day after they wrote down their answers. If they get feedback three days later, they may not receive nearly as much benefit.

♦ Consider informal grading. Put a check mark. Put a check and a plus. Make one helpful comment. Don’t bother with the gradebook. Just let students know you looked at their work. Not everything needs to be recorded!

I hope this helps, readers. Have a great day!

Test preparation today sometimes steals from regular classes and long-established electives in the core curriculum. When I was teaching Spanish a couple of years ago, I was expected to steal 4+ minutes from each of my classes every day for “math minutes.” I passed out, timed and collected math minute worksheets daily. After a few weeks, I followed the lead of colleagues and did all the worksheets in one big 10-minute lump at the end of the week, saving paper-handling.

After a few weeks of picking up sheets obviously covered with wrong answers, I also sometimes dropped Spanish for long enough to explain how to do that day’s math before my students tackled their latest challenge. I ended up losing more than twenty minutes during those Friday classes, but that seemed preferable to passing out papers to be slaughtered by students who 1) did not know the math expected and 2) did not care.

A school secretary was tasked with keeping track of math minute compliance. In a school with more than 2,000 students, I can’t imagine how many total hours of work that represented. Every teacher had to do math minutes. Once each quarter, we also had to assign a five-paragraph argumentative English essay. The secretary called if papers were turned in late.

Five or six classes each giving essays adds up to a great deal of writing. Students whined, “I have to do this for art, math, chemistry and history, too!” Resentment was high. Substandard efforts were common. Some essays were hand-slopped together in disconnected prose, filled with non sequiturs and fascinating logical leaps. Should we allow illegal immigrants to settle here? No, I discovered, because they will use up all the food and water.

Well, that would be bad, that’s for sure, I thought. Fortunately, I did not have to grade the essays, although I was supposed to correct them, looking for problems in grammar and structure. Sometimes I hardly knew where to start. Thirsty folks, those immigrants.

Was the net effect of student palpable ill-will and lack of effort worth the results? Math practice and essay writing are beneficial to students, so administrators could easily justify extra practice time in these areas. What got forgotten or ignored in the process, though, was the opportunity cost, the material never taught in Spanish, history, music or ceramics, material taken away from classes that didn’t directly address future test needs, especially when so little productive effort was put into some of the actual math minutes and essays themselves.

In exchange for that opportunity cost, we probably did gain points in math testing. I am not sure we gained points in English. I read through too much massacred English that had been used to sculpt a stunning lack of critical thinking. The kids knew they had to do the essay. That poor secretary was checking. They also knew that their essay did not count toward in their Spanish grade.

Eduhonesty: Do you have math minutes, essays or their equivalent to do? This is my advice for you: Try to make those minutes count. If you have to drop what you are doing to teach math or English, do what you have to do. In the end, we only have our students for a short time. We don’t want to waste their time. I kept trying to get back to Spanish. If I had my minutes and essays to do over, I might have taught more math. I would have let the English go. I can teach English, but I doubt I could have convinced those students to care about their essays when they were simultaneously writing five of them for no grade.

But I let my students wing the math minutes too many times. Those minutes tested discrete topics that were teachable. If they had to do the work, they should have received the instruction necessary for success from the start. I could have managed that with my initial math minutes.

If you are a teacher who is caught up and always ready for the week, you can skip this post! If you are a new reader, I ask you to share this with colleagues who are just getting started with teaching or colleagues who are feeling swamped right now.

I know many readers are new or fairly new to teaching. By this point in the year, sometimes teachers have the glub glub glub sense that they are going under, as the time demands of their position take over their lives. Maybe your week-end just got sucked away from you.

Here are some tips to help:

♦ Read the lesson plan for tomorrow at the end of the school day before you leave the building. This allows for emergency trips to Walmart or the Dollar Store. It’s easiest to stop on the way home.

♦ Stock up on regularly used materials, especially if you find a sale. These materials will differ from subject to subject and grade to grade, but it’s a good bet you will need markers and/or colored pencils and glue sticks.

♦ When possible, try to grade as you go. You can often do this as you are helping with classwork. You can still buy those old green gradebooks from days of yore, or you can print out spreadsheet pages to attach to a clipboard. Put your students names in the first column and print the gridlines to make blank boxes. One advantage to this approach will be evident immediately. Many students work more diligently in class when they see that clipboard walking around.

♦ Don’t grade everything. You can put a check or a check with a plus on many items that don’t need to be in a gradebook and add praise where due. Students mostly want to know you looked at their work. (Don’t tell them work will be ungraded, though. The quality of some students’ work slips dramatically if they don’t expect that work to figure in their grade.)

♦ Consider not leaving school until all the grading is done and all materials are ready for the next day, if family and other demands don’t make this impossible. Staying to grade can make for a long day, but the advantage is huge. When you leave, you will often be completely done for the day. You will be able to watch Rizzoli and Isles in peace, without your laptop in front of you and papers strewn all over the floor in front of the TV.

♦ If you are not naturally good with time, set timers or your phone to alert you to the need to move on to the next item in your lesson plan. I’d suggest setting the alerts when you are reading your tomorrow’s lesson plan at the end of the day.

♦ Are your routines slipping? Don’t let them get away from you. Routines save time. You want those first few minutes of class clear to finish attendance and do set-up work. Make sure you have a functional opener and that kids know what to do without your help. By now, they should be entering class and starting to work on their own. If they are not, ask a colleague for advice on how to get this piece in place.

♦ Before the day begins, ask yourself: “What do my students need to learn?” Staying focused keeps time from slipping away.

♦ Take time to call parents. Whether for homework, behavioral or disciplinary issues, parents can help. Parent calls tend to get put on the back burner, but that’s a mistake. Five or ten minutes talking to mom may prevent hours of student issues throughout the year.

♦ Have some fun! Schedule dinner with a friend. Make Thursday family board game night. Join a book club. Establish a regular gym routine.  You will get more done faster when you are having some fun. You’ll be less of a grouch in class, too.

(Another post for newbies especially and anyone else who wants food for thought.)

Hello, new teachers,

Your education professors undoubtedly spent a fair amount of time teaching you to create lessons that involve group work. Cooperative learning has been in style for quite awhile. They may also have taught you methods for managing competition. You have likely been steered away from competition, since competition has winners and losers. Educational theory today doesn’t support creating possible losers, despite the fact that we are constantly gathering data that orders students by test score results from highest to lowest.

I owe this post to a former principal who was also a former football coach. I was teaching two grades in the same classroom that year, very unusual in these times except in rural areas. My classroom had seventh and eighth graders. We were talking about a language-learning strategy and he said, “Good idea. You can have them compete. Seventh graders against eighth graders.”

We did compete. We had fun. I pitted grade against grade and discovered that competition worked much better than I had expected. Bilingual language acquisition went up. The eighth graders usually won, but the seventh graders could win with effort, and effort went up as they tried to capture that language-learning crown. In the meantime, the eighth graders were working hard to avoid the embarrassment of being outlearned by the seventh graders.

Tonight, all across the country, people tuned in to watch the Cubbies and the Mets. We are a country of baseball, football, basketball, hockey and soccer fans. Sports bars dot the landscape. Sports events command big ticket prices.

Many humans relish competition, even crave it. They like a good fight. They like to explore their own wits and abilities. They will fight to capture a flag for no other reason than because that flag happens to be there, and they want to prove they can reach it first.

Competition often works at least as well as cooperation for learning. Teachers have to be careful to keep sensitive children out of the line of fire, but allowing boys and girls to compete in carefully-structured games and contests can promote learning in a way that cooperative group work does not. Some kids are wired to compete. They take winning seriously, more seriously than they will ever take a role in a cooperative group.

Eduhonesty suggestion: Play Jeopardy. Invent a few board games. Toss a plastic ball around in a game of fraction to decimal hot potato.

We can be too sensitive. If a kid really seems unable to handle losing, then let that kid keep score or work on an independent project. But don’t be afraid to pit the boys against the girls or whatever dynamic would work within your classroom. Most kids like to play games. Supporting that spirit — going with the grain — can net big academic gains.

One important last note for newbies: Shut the game down if behavior gets out of hand. If you want to keep playing games, you will have to be able to control the group while you play. I recommend going over behavioral expectations in advance, especially the ones about not making fun of anyone. Then hold your ground. Pull out individuals who break the rules. If too many kids are ignoring rules, tell the class the game is over and give them desk work. Have homework ready that you can convert into classwork for this purpose.

Games are great, but games can also be challenging to manage. As kids get excited, they begin to push limits. You must make sure the limits hold. Those limits make the fun activities possible.

I was at a potluck tonight, talking to a man who creates community gardens. He recently added an enabling garden with upraised plots for people in wheelchairs and people using walkers. Members of his group pay monthly fees to have plots at his sites. He has a mission, helping people to grow vegetables.

This man went to a local school to offer them a plot. The plot would be across from the school, convenient and easy to access. He planned to offer this space as a free benefit to local students and even volunteered to find people to help keep plants alive through the summer.

“We will have to see if we can work it into the curriculum,” he was told.

The school did not take him up on his offer.

Eduhonesty: When we are so busy trying to raise math and English scores that we can’t grow a few zucchini, we are making a mistake. In this time when administrators’ jobs often hinge on test score results, I am not surprised the school was unwilling to sacrifice academic time to gardening. I can’t fault those administrators. I am sad for the kids, though.

From an Education Week blog:

Student Tracking vs. Academic Pathways: Different…or the Same?

By Marc Tucker on October 15, 2015 6:25 AM

…

The most insidious aspect of the sorting—or tracking—system is the way it results in teachers making judgments about the innate ability of students and then adjusting the challenge of the curriculum they get to the judgment they made. This inevitably leads to self-fulfilling prophecies.

There is only one antidote to the sorting mentality—new or old—and its insidious consequences. That is to stop adjusting the challenge level of the curriculum down to the presumed ability of the students. It is to set high standards for all students, not just some, and then to do whatever is necessary to get the students to those standards. That sounds impossibly naïve, but it is just what the top-performing countries do. Judging from their results, it works.

Eduhonesty:  Oh, please, help us somebody!  Yes, I’d call that demand for high standards for all students naïve. It’s also not what top-performing countries do, not exactly. Yes, they set high standards and expectations, as we should. But they also sort students. Finland sorts students into vocational as opposed to college tracks. In high school, students enter one track or the other in a nearly even split. The following graph shows Finnish options. http://www.ncee.org/programs-affiliates/center-on-international-education-benchmarking/top-performing-countries/finland-overview/finland-instructional-systems/

I had a long conversation a few years ago with a young woman on a train in Germany about the German educational system. After completing their primary education (at 10 years of age, 12 in Berlin and Brandenburg), children attend one of five types of secondary schools in Germany. The five kinds of schools vary from state to state in Germany. Essentially, students have a vocational option, a college-track option, and schools that offer elements of both.

South Korea does not do vocational tracking, but instead follows the exhortation above to set “high standards for all students, not just some, and then to do whatever is necessary to get the students to those standards.”

In “An Assault Upon Our Children: South Korea’s Education System Hurts Students,” by SE-WOONG KOO, AUG. 1, 2014, Koo talks about the South Korean educational system and the chest pains and allergies his brother suffered from the stress of being a student in South Korea. Mom moved Koo out of the country to Vancouver because of that stress. To quote a paragraph from that article:

“The world may look to South Korea as a model for education — its students rank among the best on international education tests — but the system’s dark side casts a long shadow. Dominated by Tiger Moms, cram schools and highly authoritarian teachers, South Korean education produces ranks of overachieving students who pay a stiff price in health and happiness. The entire program amounts to child abuse. It should be reformed and restructured without delay.”

I strongly recommend the rest of the article at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/02/opinion/sunday/south-koreas-education-system-hurts-students.html?_r=0

Eduhonesty: Articles like “Student Tracking vs. Academic Pathways: Different…or the Same?” make me want to toss up my hands and write science fiction. I am hanging in here only because I have watched children paying the price for all this idealistic propaganda. I feel the need to try to rescue those children. I am also offended by the presumptuousness behind some of that idealism. The world needs as many plumbers as philosophers. In fact, in terms of job openings, I’d far rather be a plumber than a philosopher. If I opened my own business, I’d almost certainly make more money repairing toilets and faucets than the average philosopher makes. I’m pretty sure my plumber makes more in a year than I ever have as a teacher.  I wouldn’t be surprised to discover he makes twice as much.

In the meantime, this country has racked up $1.2 trillion in college-loan debt. In many cases, students did not finish and get a degree, but they remain saddled with those loans, albatrosses tied around their necks for possible decades. Too often, counselors and other responsible adults knew or should have known that those debt-laden students had little chance of college success, but said nothing. That truth was left off the agenda, a victim of the social agenda of college-for-all.

Our students are real people, not items in a social agenda. Instead of telling them they must go to college, we ought to create alternative options for those who don’t like school and/or who have trouble with the “rigorous” material that now sometimes has become our only offering. What do we have to offer to students who can’t follow the complex questions favored by the Common Core? They exist. The PARCC and Smarter Balance test results amply demonstrate that they exist.

I acknowledge we can’t unleash large hordes of electricians on the world, but community colleges offer many programs that could be taken in high school. I have a former student who is paying a technical school $13,000 to become a medical assistant right now. Why don’t we offer that option in high school? Many one- and two-year programs could be spread out over the four years of high school. Why don’t we offer automotive repair, CAD/CAM classes, graphic design and practical nursing to interested students? Why not allow students to study to become dental hygienists? My students spend so much money to go to culinary school and beauty school after high school – and we leave them no choice. In many cases, they know what they want to do by the time they are sixteen or even younger. They then go straight to trade school or the community college specifically to get a degree or certificate that their high school could have offered them sooner for free.

The idea that working harder will somehow result in a universe where everyone can pass the annual state standardized test and go to college seems to be the pipe dream propelling our government’s agenda. If that pipe dream were true, No Child Left Behind might have succeeded. The government set up Draconian penalties for failing to make targets and then told the schools to make NCLB work. Yet NCLB never worked. Many of the best schools in the country ended up on watch and warning lists, while curriculums were gutted, recesses were eliminated, and cheating skyrocketed.

I’d like to ask the people making today’s educational policy to come down off Mount Olympus and talk to some of the students in our middle schools and high schools — and not just the middle schools and high schools in their own middle class and upper class neighborhoods. Come on down, guys. Meet America’s students. Find out who they are. Ask them what they want. Ask them how we can help them to achieve their dreams, with the understanding that wanting to cut and color hair should be considered a perfectly acceptable answer.

That girl who wants to go to beauty school? The odds are excellent that she will do exactly that. She does not need to hear that she is making a mistake and should go to college to study chemistry instead. When we don’t create alternative high school pathways, but insist that students stay on the one-and-only-one true path, the college path, we devalue that girl’s interests and choices. We may or may not change her mind about going to beauty school. But if we don’t, our words and their implicit criticism may succeed in making that girl feel like an underperforming, second-class citizen for the rest of her life.

We have to present our students with all their options. We have to offer them the possibility of college and university success when possible. I’ve had many students who remained completely uninterested in college after the many years of being pushed in that direction, though. I’ve had students who already knew they intended to join dad’s landscaping business. I’ve had students who did not read or who could not read and who simply were not going to succeed unless they had a personal epiphany. Without that epiphany, those students had no business taking out student loans.

Maybe we need to take a hard look at the Finnish model. After a decade of NCLB, the learning landscape does not seem to have radically improved. We still have many students who are unready for college, academically and/or emotionally. So I am going to end by disagreeing with Marc.

Call it tracking. Call it pathways. Call it whatever acronym you want to invent for it. I believe we ought to provide real vocational tracks to our students. I’d wait until high school. But if a sixteen-year-old girl wants to study auto repair at the expense of the college curriculum, I’d say let her go for it. Let her graduate with a skill she can turn into a job.

If she changes her mind later, she can fill in her educational gaps at a community college. Community colleges have become fully expert at remedial education. Many young Americans have gone back to school in their twenties and gone on get advanced degrees.

Opening practical, vocational pathways should not be considered closing doors. For many students, these pathways will open doors. My former student could easily have learned to be a medical assistant in high school. As it stands, she will owe $13,000, a debt I don’t believe she should ever have had to incur.