The drop-out problem has been slowly improving, but remains intransigent in some areas. The Washington Times reports the following: “Detroit Public Schools’ 65 percent graduation rate was well below the nation’s top rate in cities – 79 percent in Houston, Columbus, Ohio, and Des Moines, Iowa – but above 62 percent in Milwaukee and 60 percent in Indianapolis. The Detroit district, which includes 74.9 percent low-income students, mirrored the 64 percent graduation rate for low-income students across Michigan.” (By Emma Fidel, Associated Press, April 28, 2014)

In this time when almost everyone except the garden slugs has heard about the value of a college education and the necessity of a high school education, many kids still drift aimlessly away from school. Others have a plan. My former bilingual students mostly have left to help dad with his landscape/construction/cleaning business or to get some other job to help support the family. We need the money now, they will explain to me, as I try to keep them in school.

I am sure those students are telling me the truth. They want to earn money to help their families. That financial explanation only forms part of the picture, however. I have had students who were working full-time at grocery stores while attending high school full-time. Work or school does not have to be an either/or option.

Why are our children fleeing into the Speedy Market jobs? Why are they quitting school to make sandwiches and hang bags of Doritos on little hooks? Why does flipping thousands of burgers seem preferable to another year of high school classes? I put curriculum choices right up there with test-preparation burnout, both of these natural consequences of our standardized testing obsession combined with educational funding restrictions. We are planning our students’ lives without consulting our students or even really looking at them.

We don’t listen often enough when our students say, “I hate school.” When Elise says, “I don’t want to take biology,” we smile condescendingly and tell her “you need biology for college.”

She doesn’t want biology. At this point, we had best hope she enjoys her other classes. With luck, she has a passion for mathematics or another subject. Because if not, she may decide she doesn’t need biology and she doesn’t need high school, either. When her parents exert pressure on her to stay, she may also default to the tried and true, “Momma, I’m gonna have a baby!” There’s more than one way out of school when a student is pressured to stay.

We used to place students in classes based on their understanding levels. We still do to some extent, especially in math. But nowadays the curriculum may demand the teaching of topics for which a class is genuinely unready – because those topics will be on the test. I am reminded of a quote from a staff meeting two years ago:

Special education teacher: But do I have to teach this? My kids can’t understand it.
Principal: Do they have to take the same test as everybody else?
Special education teacher: Yes.
Principal: Then they have to learn the same stuff. Do it.

Eduhonesty: Obviously we can’t let students decide their own curricula. We would be giving classes in Wiz Khalifa and brownie baking. But we do need to keep the big picture in mind. When school becomes nothing but tests and test preparation, some kids will not merely opt out of the test. They will opt out of school altogether.

Most of Europe offers a vocational track. Too many of our vocational tracks have become pathetic bus trips to local community colleges. Too many of our schools offer almost nothing except that test/college track that I believe is making some students exit the educational scene.

If you can never do well on those tests, why would you stay?

I offer the following as food for thought:

“Kindergarten gets tough as kids are forced to bubble in multiple choice tests:
They don’t even know how to hold a pencil yet, but kindergartners are getting a taste of the tough side of education with Common Core standardized math tests.”
BY RACHEL MONAHAN, NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, Thursday, October 10, 2013, 2:30 AM
…
Administering the exams is a complete headache, teachers said. “They don’t know how to hold pencils,” said a Bronx kindergarten teacher whose class recently took the Pearson exam. “They don’t know letters, and you have answers that say A, B, C or D and you’re asking them to bubble in . . . They break down; they cry.”

These tests probably also inspire teachers to rescue students. I can easily see a kindergarten teacher helping students to find the right bubbles. I can see that teacher clumsily guiding a pencil in little circles and swirls around a bubble, giving that student a first taste of “getting help” on a test. What are we teaching?

In Delinquency: The Untold Story of Student Loan Borrowing by Alisa F. Cunningham and Gregory S Kienzl, Ph.D. (2011), Cunningham and Kienzl note that the borrowers who struggle most to repay their loans, unsurprisingly, are those who failed to graduate, with 33% delinquent without defaulting and 26% defaulting. That’s one in four defaults, an atomic bomb of a credit hit. Those who graduated with a degree defaulted far less often, although schools attended affect that percentage significantly. Graduates of four-year public or private nonprofit schools did better than graduates of for-profit and public two year institutions. A very high proportion of students who enroll at for-profit colleges borrow—almost 88 percent in 2007–08, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (2008).

Our 2-year community colleges remain marvelous resources but the fact is that they admit many students who cannot meet entrance requirements for other, more selective colleges. One by-product of this policy is the higher level of students who require remedial math and English courses, courses that don’t count toward graduation but are simply intended to help an unready student prepare to start college. Several studies have found community college remediation class rates surpassing 50 percent. Less than one-quarter of these students requiring remediation will earn a certificate or degree within eight years. More than half of students who take out loans to enroll in two-year for-profit colleges never finish. (Source: Education Trust)

Without continuing this barrage of depressing numbers, I’d like to observe that the number of college drop-outs is on the rise, and many of these drop-outs are carrying loans like Jacob Marley’s chains, clanking burdens that hamper their moves at every step. These drop-outs often end up unemployed or underemployed, with little prospect of paying off their multi-hundred dollar loan payments in a timely fashion.

We need to stop telling all of our students that they must go to college. I have watched and listened as counselors walked into my bilingual classes to tell students about the necessity of a college education. Ummm… while not wholly inappropriate in all cases, that 17-year-old girl who spoke about 200 words of English? She had zero chance of being ready. About half that class spoke only rudimentary English. That student who got a 17 on his or her ACT test? That student should not be given advice on getting into college. ACT Inc. pegs the college-readiness score at around 21 points. Students who are clearly unready need to receive a realistic picture of their chances for college success, not a speech on how great college will be. Those politicians and counselors selling the college dream won’t be the ones saddled with loans when that dream turns into a multiyear, repayment nightmare.

I am a certified high school math teacher. One of my kids is working on her doctoral degree in math. I don’t understand this check.

(http://www.washingtontimes.com/multimedia/image/checkjpg/)

I am sure I can figure it out, but that’s not the point. The country that put its astronauts on the moon had a very different approach to elementary math in the not-distant past. Why do we believe this new approach is better? Who says so? Where’s their proof? What will adding this level of complexity to the mathematical process, especially in elementary school, gain us in the long-run?

The check’s silly, but the idea is not. Even if elementary kids master the math of our time, they are learning a system that the rest of the world does not use. And I believe we are confusing the heck out of them. I spent years as a bilingual teacher and here is an observation that I feel compelled to share: Recently arrived students from Mexico who had lived in urban areas often seemed much better prepared for middle school math than their American counterparts.

Let me add one last question that came to mind when I saw this check. Who is teaching the teachers this new math? In addition to the big $$$ from all the new textbooks aligned to the Common Core, I can only assume Pearson and others are garnering hefty consulting fees as they send out coaches to explain how to write the silly checks inspired by their math new books. Learning Common Core math must require a fair amount of training.

I hope Melridge Elementary got its money.

I seized this note and kept it.

If we want a snapshot that captures the challenge of teaching middle school in one quick moment, I’d say this pic works. Was the writer concentrating on her math? Hardly. She gave that math only brief flashes of attention and the same could be said for her girlfriend. Those girls had far more important issues to manage than lining up decimal points, in their own minds anyway.

Eduhonesty: Sigh. Some days I think same-sex schools might be a good idea.

In my last post, I included the following paragraph:

“Before accepting an offer, check these assertions with rank-and-file teachers in the building. Ask them about meetings and data. Ask them about standardized test prep, benchmark tests and other mandatory testing procedures. Ask them about teacher camaraderie. Where do most people eat lunch? Ask them if they believe their school is well run. Why or why not? How large are classes? Are disciplinary policies effective? What’s the best thing about the district? What’s the worst?”

When I reread that post, I thought about a rewrite, a reorganization. Then I decided I’d leave this paragraph alone, but comment on the order of the ideas. I find it sad that I started with meetings, data, standardized test prep, benchmark tests and other mandatory testing procedures before I ever reached the set of questions that I would have asked first ten or even five years ago — the questions we ought to be asking. Are the other teachers fun to work with? Are they helpful? Is the school well run? What will daily life be like in your school?

Tests, testing and test preparatory activities easily ate up 10% of my school year last year and, depending on how “test preparatory activities” is defined, may have come closer to eating up 20%. Going into an interview for a new position, my main concern now would be finding out if I would actually be given enough time to teach between tests.

I ended my last post in a rather bleak place. To readers who are choosing to fight the good fight in our most difficult schools, I apologize. We can’t give up. We should not give up. Teaching is a calling. Few of us enter teaching for the pay or pleasant working conditions. Those tough, urban classrooms demand dedicated teachers. Schools that crank through four-thousand-some referrals over the course of the year require the best to even function.

That said, I think yesterday’s post reflects a truth. You are unlikely to be rewarded for having chosen to work in America’s war zones. Very few people will look at you and say, “You work in South Chicago? Wonderful!” Some of them will even ask you why you would do such a crazy thing. Then they will ask questions like, “Why don’t you go to work in Hinsdale or Flossmoor?” In other words, why don’t you find a tony suburb that has money? Good friends may even try to help, offering to talk to the Superintendent of their local district who happens to attend the same Cardio III class.

Expect curiosity. Don’t expect support. Don’t even expect support from your administration. The odds are that the people at the top of your school are under so much pressure to increase test scores that they can’t or won’t take a step back to ask themselves about staff morale. Their jobs now often depend on pushing up highly resistant numbers. With mortgages to pay, they may try to root out any weakness they perceive, and they may never find time to check their perceptions.

Stress will be high. I am reminded of Gimli in “Lord of the Rings.” When he says “Certainty of death, *small* chance of success… What are we waiting for?” he captures the feel of our urban and rural drop-out factories.

If you can handle the stress, those kids need you far more than the kids in Hinsdale or Flossmoor. But if you finish this year feeling like the orcs won, get on the internet. First and second year teachers have an easier time finding new positions than most. Districts like to hire people who did those first, underperforming years somewhere else and who now may be ready for primetime. But even older teachers can make changes, especially those who will consider moving to outlying areas. And I’d say let a few steps go if you are feeling extremely stressed. Money should always be secondary to health.

Eduhonesty: If you do decide to seek alternative employment, be ready with a set of questions. You don’t want to jump off the ramparts into a new sea of orcs. Almost the whole country is fighting to push up numbers. That magic school where you don’t spend the week in multiple meetings figuring out how to gather and present multiple new sets of data while learning the four new software programs of the year? Finding that school most likely will become a quest.

I view my last piece of advice as critical to any teachers who do get another, seemingly better offer later this year: Talk to teachers in the school. When trying to fill positions, administrators can seem like the kindest, most supportive bunch of people you ever met. If a Principal’s goal is to add you to a new, stronger team, that Principal may tell you exactly what you want to hear:

♦ “We get together regularly for fun, team-building activities.”
♦ “Yes, we have many professional development opportunities.”
♦ “We want our teachers to have all the planning and preparation time they need.”

Before accepting an offer, check these assertions with rank-and-file teachers in the building. Ask them about meetings and data. Ask them about standardized test prep, benchmark tests and other mandatory testing procedures. Ask them about teacher camaraderie. Where do most people eat lunch? Ask them if they believe their school is well run. Why or why not? How large are classes? Are disciplinary policies effective? What’s the best thing about the district? What’s the worst?

Teachers tend to interview the Principal and administration when seeking a new position. That’s useful, but the people in the know are the teachers in the hallways. At the end of a successful interview, I suggest you ask to talk with members of your prospective department/grade about their curriculum and approaches to that curriculum.

Before you buy that Spanish 1 house, you want to make sure no bodies have been buried in the basement.

(A post for newbies and others.)

The above disciplinary referral form is fairly typical. I stumbled on some numbers from a meeting I attended. These numbers come from a middle-class high school where I taught Spanish. Toward the end of the school year, out of 2084 students, 1,354 had no disciplinary referrals, 322 kids had one referral, 283 kids had 2-5 referrals, 66 kids had 6-8 referrals and 59 kids had 9+ referrals.

In and of themselves, the numbers don’t tell us very much. The referral paper trail depends upon a culture. In a school where referrals result in action, many more referrals may be written, especially when that action is timely. If two weeks normally elapse before any detention or consequence happens, referrals will fall, as teachers opt for immediate, in-class consequences. In a school that requires a great deal of teacher intervention before referrals can be written, fewer referrals will make their way to the Dean’s office. Once a teacher has called parents and held a conference with the student, any extra paperwork may seem like an unnecessary burden given the expected payback from that work. If referrals fall into a black-hole and nothing happens without direct teacher interaction with administration, very few referrals will ever be written. Why bother? I have worked under all these conditions.

Middle schools and high schools may go through thousands of referrals. More than a few times, I have ended up photocopying the front sheet of a referral form while my school waited for new forms to arrive. On top of habitually running out of paper for the copy machines, my last school seemed to have regular referral-form crises.

I’d like to focus on only a few numbers above, though, the 66 kids who earned 6-8 referrals and the 59 kids who earned 9+ referrals. Those numbers ought to give many people pause. Together, these two categories contain 5.9% of the high school’s total population. That’s slightly over 1 in 20 kids. They reflect a daunting and underdiscussed problem within America’s educational system.

Referrals are only written for a fraction of misbehaviors, and I’d say many or most teachers only write up fairly serious misbehaviors. A few teachers burn through referral forms like locusts in a wheat field, but most teachers would rather manage minor infractions themselves. Again, numbers vary by school culture, but experienced teachers often prefer to deal with minor misbehaviors directly, rather than wait for later consequences from an office. If Aaron calls Mark a “shithead” without rancor or any attempt to offend, as a random word choice in a regular conversation, I don’t want to lock into an elaborate disciplinary process. Referrals take time. I don’t want to let the incident go, of course. But making Aaron miss five to ten minutes of lunch while I discuss proper language will often solve my problem. New teachers and teachers under scrutiny may also avoid writing referrals for fear of appearing unable to manage their classes.

That one in twenty kids thus comprise only a fraction of the disciplinary issues teachers encounter during the year, possibly a small fraction. The actual fraction will vary depending on administrative response time and helpfulness. During the year of the black hole, clumps of hair could be seen in the hallway and I am not sure that all those fights were even written up.

Here’s the academic whammy that we too seldom talk about. If 1 in 20 students are getting 6 or more referrals in a year, and about half of those students are getting nine or more referrals that year, actionable misbehavior has become a regular part of classroom life. A teacher with a homeroom of 30 students may easily get two to three regular offenders in that class. In a very unlucky draw, four or more Dean’s office regulars can be placed in the same room.

Eduhonesty: I plan to continue this thread in another post, but I’d like to make a few observations for new teachers to end this post. If you are like many new teachers, you may be starting in an economically or financially-disadvantaged district. These districts tend to have greater disciplinary issues, often spawning many more referrals than academically and financially stronger districts. Unsurprisingly, they also have disproportionately more teaching vacancies. Major urban areas always have openings. Government numbers show that larger schools in urban areas are particularly prone to one category in the statistics: Widespread disorder in classrooms. Larger minority populations and higher poverty rates also tend to be correlated with higher widespread disorder. More information is available at the following site: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/crimeindicators/crimeindicators2011/tables/table_07_1.asp.

If disciplinary issues are causing you stress and confusion, please ask colleagues for advice. They have been there. Strict routines help. Clearly defined rules and procedures help. Carefully arranged seating charts help. If the chart is not working, feel free to alter seating arrangements, but you want to avoid making frequent changes. You are striving to create a safe, stable atmosphere.

Ask colleagues about writing referrals. Does this offense merit a referral? How many referrals are too many? Which dean or administrator is most likely to help? What should you do if the referral does not help? How can you write that referral without losing class time? When do you call security? What do you do in a fight? What does the school consider to be excessive tardiness? How disruptive must student behavior be to qualify for a referral? How profane? You need to learn your school’s culture so you don’t seem petty and nitpicky or the opposite, too lenient with disciplinary infractions.

I’m going to give a piece of advice here. Don’t touch anyone in a fight. Aside from the question of getting yourself injured, I saw a colleague sacrifice his job with this move once. The student’s mom complained that my colleague had pulled her son off another student too roughly. One month’s suspension, half of it without pay, and my colleague ended up in a downward spiral with the district. He’s happily teaching in another state now, but once you touch a student, you can end up in a parent’s crosshairs. Don’t be certain that the administration will back you up, especially if you are a new teacher. If the fight starts, call or yell for security immediately while you move students out of the way.

A second piece of advice: If you have a class that has three or more students who are regularly disrupting the class, talk to administration about rearranging student schedules. You will have to do this soon. The later in the semester, the less likely you are to succeed. If you can split your four into two and two, daily life will improve dramatically. You can’t always do this — some schools will not touch established schedules — but when enough learning time is being lost or commandeered by out-of-control adolescents, a desperate roll of the dice to try to separate students can’t hurt. I’d be ready with specific instances where the dynamic between troublemakers has made learning problematic for the rest of the class.

For those new teachers starting in academically- and financially stronger districts, I’ll pass on the same advice but you may be lucky enough to confront these issues far less often. The desire to go to college helps keep students out of the Dean’s office. As free or reduced lunches fall in the government table referenced above, so does widespread disorder in classrooms.

That’s the academic whammy that does not receive enough attention. The teacher who deals with disciplinary issues regularly starts at a disadvantage in terms of academics and test scores. Disciplinary infractions and referrals suck time out of the school day. They take up afterschool time as teachers call home, hold conferences, stay behind for detentions, write up notices, consult social workers and counselors, rearrange seating charts, etc. Most importantly, behaviors that lead to referrals regularly distract classes. In this time when merit pay, evaluation numbers and even retention may hinge on student performance, teachers in financially- and academically disadvantaged districts end up at a disadvantage outside of their control.

I’m sorry to say that my last piece of advice proceeds naturally enough from what I just wrote: Are you working in that large, urban school? Are your students test scores and behavior being used to assess your performance? You ought to try to get out. Come spring, you should explore online postings for new positions. Yes, maybe you love your school. But your odds of succeeding as a teacher will go up as you move up the socioeconomic and academic ladder. When student test scores, behavior and enthusiasm become the major criteria in any teacher’s evaluation, that teacher’s best move will be to strike out to find a district where both test scores and student aspirations run high.

(This will be another practical post mostly for newbies.)

I am a bit late writing this. Districts keep pushing school years back into the summer to allow more time to prepare for that annual state test on which careers may rise and fall. Some schools now start in July. But I hope this proves helpful to a group of readers.

Are you furiously putting up student work in your classroom to get ready for incoming parents? Are you helping students organize their work to show to their parents? At open house and parent-teacher conferences, parents will form their first impression of you. Taking time to create a caring, professional environment can go a long way toward making your year easier.

As parents enter, I recommend getting contact information first so this piece does not get forgotten. If parents say they don’t have a phone or an email address — in financially-disadvantaged districts, especially those with many immigrant parents, this is not uncommon — then try to get a contact phone or email. Somebody’s uncle will do. A few uncles and aunts are better. I suggest buying index cards. On the front of each index card, record a student’s name. Write down any contact information below that name.

I once coined a phrase I still like: Disconnected kids have disconnected phones. Disconnected kids need you to be able to reach parents somehow. The fact that poor behavior or lack of effort can get back to parents definitely improves behavior and effort, at least on the part of some students.

You will want to have folders of student work ready to view. If your class is keeping work in binders, this step should be simple. If you can find time before conferences, I would suggest trying to put sticky notes on binder items you want to share so you can find examples of good or problematic work quickly.

If you have not yet begun making students collect their work and keep that work in binders, I’d suggest starting this week. With luck, your school provides binders. If not, you can tell students to bring in binders, but that may prove frustrating as the excuses pile up and the days go by. I suggest going out and buying cheap binders. Let students purchase them at cost or below cost. I usually quietly give a few away.

Tell students that parents will see their binders. Help students by allowing time to put classwork and homework in binders. Regular reminders that these binders are for parents helps to get best student efforts.

Walk around to assist with organization as students file away their work. Teaching students to think about how to organize their papers does them a great service. By middle school, organizational deficits can sink less methodical kids as they try to keep track of six classes and six teachers. Sixth and seventh grade teachers — the best gift you can give your students will be the ability to create a system that will allow them to keep track of their work and their future responsibilities.

Oops! How did this post become, “Our Friend the Binder”?

Back to conferences. You have your organized, alphabetized binders. You have your parents and their contact information. You have any other forms the school wants them to sign while they are there, such as school handbooks, for example. Now what?

Some teachers prepare a PowerPoint on classroom plans and expectations, especially for open house events. Open house is not intended to be a time for one-on-one teacher conferences. Parents will try to engage you in these conferences anyway. If that happens, say something short to indicate you are available to talk about Mary, but you can’t have that conversation during open house. I’d suggest being prepared with a list of times for possible parent meetings later.

For parent-teacher conferences, you will want access to student work, grades and other data, such as test scores and attendance. The data’s not the conversation, however. It’s too easy to get lost in a data dump nowadays because we have so much data. If you find yourself doing all the talking, as you explain scores and percentages, please take a step back.

It’s important to remember that conferences are a two-way conversation. Show that you care by asking questions and listening to answers. While parents are learning how their children are progressing in school, you want to learn about their home and community lives. Parents often know student strengths and weaknesses, and learning styles. They can identify possible future problems. When mom says, “Don’t let her sit next to Marisol,” that’s good advice. While the emphasis of a conference should be on learning, social and home factors affect learning at all levels, and parents know your students’ lives. If Mary seems distracted, explore the problem with her parent(s). Is she sleeping enough? Is she having social difficulties? Has she seemed more distracted lately? How much time does she spend gaming in the evening?

The tone of parent–teacher conferences should be determined by students’ needs. In all cases, you will want to lead with the positive, whether that’s a well-done assignment or a funny story. For students who are doing well academically, you will wish to point out areas where they might strengthen performance. What can Jimmy do to become even better in math? The Jimmy conferences tend to be fun and easy.

The real challenge of conferences rests in discussions with parents of struggling students. I have always had trouble striking the right balance when talking about these students. If you are like me, you will want to be optimistic about Nolan’s behavior or Mary’s academics. You will want to emphasize the positives. For students who are genuinely struggling, you must take a more somber tone. I have sometimes downplayed my problems, spinning them for myself and for parents. I should not have done so.

While parents should hear the good, they also deserve to get the full picture. I suggest a “just the facts ma’am” approach. Instead of saying, “I know Mary has been distracted by her new baby brother, but she is not turning in some of her assignments,” eliminate any excuses, explanations or rationalizations you might be about to offer. Instead simply say, “Mary has not turned in six of the last ten assignments.” Then go from there to create a plan to fix Mary’s problem(s). Softening the blow does Mary no good.

Excuses, explanations and rationalizations never helped anyone get ahead in work or life in the long-run. Mary needs to do her work. Her parents need to understand that she is in trouble.

Some teachers naturally know how to handle the difficult conference. I had to work at that skill. If you tend to err often on the side of kindness, please keep in mind that parents may take you at your word. If you say, “Nolan will probably grow out of it,” those parents may wait for Nolan to grow out of “it” when they should be aggressively working on changing a behavior or finding him a tutor.

Other tidbits:

♦ Bring granola bars or snacks for yourself. You may be running for thirteen hours straight through.

♦ Dress professionally. Some teachers go for business casual, but I’d suggest notching it up a bit. On this one day, put on heels. (Unless you are a guy, although if you are a guy who wants to wear heels, that’s certainly your business.) Throw some tailoring into whatever you decide to wear. You are probably making a first impression.

♦ Bring crayons and toys for little brothers and sisters. Have books or magazines handy for older siblings. You might lay in chips and snacks for the kids.

♦ Try to stay on schedule. Some parents have multiple conferences to attend or evening jobs. Those parents may not have an extra fifteen minutes to wait in the hall.

♦ Be ready with advice. If Mary seems distracted, be ready with suggestions that may help her. Tell parents you will try moving her away from kids who distract her. Ask if parents could put her to bed earlier. Suggest shutting down the gaming system at a certain hour or not allowing gaming until all homework has been finished.

♦ Be Prepared for Surprises. Parents say the darnedest things. A mom I knew once said, “Maybe she’s just dumb. Her dad was dumb as a post.” Uhhh… It’s hard to know where to go after a comment like that. How do you respond? I’d say stick to the positives. Steer mom toward tutoring while observing that her daughter works diligently in class.

Eduhonesty: Do you have enough to do now? Are you thinking there may still be time to go into accounting or banking? I have one last piece of advice.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, Mr. or Ms. Hunt, Phelps, Briggs etc., is to call or write home. If you want to raise parental attendance, a personal invitation works wonders. In districts where parental attendance is light, this one step can cause the number of parents at open houses and conferences to skyrocket. I know this may all sound like a mountain of work, but getting parents in for conferences will help you all year long. If you do have to call home later because of academic or behavior issues, that personal relationship goes a long way towards helping you to help your students.

California has instituted a new state test based on the Common Core. Results are in and results were predictable, in my view. Scores fell as scores are beginning to fall across the country. If we keep making the tests harder, scores will go down. I’d suggest that’s common sense, although I am afraid that if I do, someone will demand my research. Common sense doesn’t get much respect nowadays.

I would like readers to follow me down my path, starting by reading the following article:
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-achievement-gaps-widen-20150911-story.html, although the below quote on the new test’s results covers the issue that spawned this post. The article’s a good read if you have time. If not, fine.

“This is going to show the real achievement gap,” said Chris Minnich, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers. “We are asking more out of our kids and I think that’s a good thing.”

At the same time, he added, “there’s no question that when we raised the bar for students that we’re going to have to support our lower-achieving students even more so than we are now.”

Although scores declined for all students, blacks and Latinos saw significantly greater drops than whites and Asians, widening the already large gap that was evident in results from earlier years, according to a Times analysis.

Under the previous test, last given to public school students two years ago, the gap separating Asian and black students was 35 percentage points in English. The gap increased to 44 percentage points under the new test. Asian students’ results dropped the least on the new tests, which widened the gap between them and those who are white, black or Latino, the analysis showed.

White students also maintained higher relative scores than their black and Latino peers.

A similar pattern occurred with students from low-income families. Their scores in math, for example, declined at a steeper rate (51%) than those of students from more affluent backgrounds (16%). In the last decade, all ethnic groups made significant academic gains compared to where their scores started. But the gap separating the scores of blacks and Latinos from whites and Asians changed little.

Eduhonesty: This widened gap between subgroups taking our standardized tests does not surprise me. When we make the test harder, some of those kids who are already at a disadvantage will fall farther than academically stronger counterparts. Why? I’m sure there are many factors, but one leaps out at me immediately. In the classroom, on harder tests, some kids at the bottom tend to give up. Many adolescents especially will quit working if they don’t believe they can succeed. If they think they might manage to get lucky by eliminating one or two wrong answers on each question, they often hang in, hoping to reason/luck their way into a decent grade. But at a certain level of difficulty — at the point where they don’t believe they can identify most or any wrong answers — students begin guessing without trying.

In a nutshell, as the test gets harder, stronger students begin to have to eliminate answers and guess between what remains, while weaker students lose that ability to eliminate answers and begin to do almost nothing except guess. This one fact explains the widening gap. The stronger students may be missing more problems as they eliminate wrong answers and then choose between what remains. But those students will get more right than students who are purely guessing. I know this guessing happens. One big clue: When a student fills in 50 bubbles on a 40 question section.

The much larger issue here of racial and income inequities I will have to save for later. Those inequities are a book, not a blog post. They are also proving remarkably resistant to attempts to level the academic playing field.