My last post edges toward whiny at times. “We all have meetings,” I am sure many readers are thinking. We all do. Almost all professional positions today come with a load of baggage, including those many meetings.

I’m going to stand on my whining, though. I perceive a larger problem in my culture at the moment. When the number of hours that Americans worked passed the number of hours the Japanese worked, giving the United States the longest work week in the world, we should not have behaved as passively as we did. We have built this work week, added responsibility by added responsibility. Why?

I had an interesting conversation with a cabbie in Toronto a couple of days ago. The cabbie was telling me about his work in Canada. He gets two weeks vacation a year. He missed Germany. In Germany he got three weeks vacation and his workday ended after eight hours. In Canada, he often has to work overtime. He is paid for those overtime hours, but he lamented the loss of a much better work regime from his past. “I come to Canada to be with my family, but I never have time to see my family,” he said.

Yet he gets more time with that family than many Americans get with their own families. To meet my full data requirements, my full meeting requirements, and my various other professional responsibilities – on top of getting ready to actually teach my classes- I would have worked every hour of every day. I was triaging, throwing out the “least useful” expectations in my bucket of a to-do list, “least useful” as defined by me, which was not necessarily “least useful” as described by the administration. I skipped data in favor of class preparation, for example, an extremely poor political move that no young teacher could afford to make. But I had not written my tests or chosen my curriculum and my students were always failing those tests. I didn’t need that data. I’d like to think administration was smart enough to understand that if my data was a sea of red for the first half the year, it continued to be a sea of red, given that no one was making any real accommodations for my students lack of English or for the fact that they were years behind the materials I was obliged to present. I was making the best accommodations I could, but since I had to give the same test that all the regular teachers were giving at the same time, my bilingual students were only surviving due to Saturday tutoring, for the most part, along with explicit effort to teach directly to the test.

Unions have been getting a bad rap lately, but I have changed my personal view on unions. I think America needs to unionize again, as we did in the time of the 14-hour day. Many of us again are working that 14-hour day. It’s not healthy, it’s not smart, and I don’t understand why we have let ourselves be led into this place.

Eduhonesty: Maybe we are like the frogs. Degree by degree, the temperature in the pot has been rising. If you throw a frog into a pot of hot water, the frog will immediately try to jump out, but if the water temperature rises gradually, the poor thing will just hunker down inside the pot, waiting to be cooked.

Degree by degree, we have been cooking ourselves. Maybe we should try to take a flying leap out of the pot instead.

Going through an old notebook, I stumble on the superteam notes. A superteam is a team of teams. This notebook is a few years old. Last year, our superteam meetings were called building meetings. We all got together Wednesday afternoons and stayed late to have a meeting of the many people going to the many meetings. I had meetings all five days of the week. On Wednesdays, I usually had three separate meetings.

Eduhonesty: I am a natural talker and mostly I don’t mind meetings, but I will observe that the minimum I spent in meetings on a given week was usually about four hours. My meetings ran over five hours some weeks. On those weeks, I spent over one-seventh of my “official” school week in meetings. I sure hope we were having “super” team meetings given the amount of time we were NOT using to get ready to teach. We spent a great deal of time on theory and content for lesson planning, but very little time remained to actually get ready for class.

Eduhonesty: In fairness, I taught two different subjects and bilingual classes so I definitely had more meetings than the average bear. I think teachers of one subject may have been getting by with only a little over three hours worth of meetings sometimes. This confluence of meetings represents one more reason, though, why I might steer a colleague away from working with disadvantaged populations. I have had special-education colleagues tell me they spent over half their day in meetings regularly.  With all due respect for necessary records and paperwork, at the point where meetings need special names, we might start wondering if the proliferation of meetings is getting out of hand.

An SLO is a “student learning objective,” yet another test that a teacher gives at the start of the year and then repeats at the end of the semester or end of the year to document that student learning has taken place. In some states now, the SLO has become part of teacher evaluations. A woman in Hawaii just lost her job because of her refusal to get involved in SLO testing. I have to say, I did not do my SLO this year. I knew I was going and, more importantly, I object to the whole concept. Too much rides on getting the right class. When I did my first SLO last year, I picked a group of college-bound juniors and seniors, instead of the bilingual students in all my other classes. I never finished the paperwork on that test because I transferred to another school in the district in the middle of the year, but sometimes I wish I had finished because I aced that SLO test. I had the right class. They were the cream of my high school and this was their first consumer math class. My students started knowing very little of the subject material and I had a whole semester to fill in what they regarded as useful knowledge. I had what I regard as a nearly perfect set up — and SLO’s are all about set up.

Multiple problems exist with SLO tests. If I teach nothing but that test all year I will succeed with my SLO. In terms of breadth of education, I may have taught damn near nothing except that test, however. The students in my classes are also critical to my potential success. In this time of SLO testing, I would never enter bilingual education. I have advised colleagues to exit bilingual education. How do I get the best score on my SLO test and therefore evaluation? I pick the strongest test takers available to me. All other factors being equal, my best bet will be to work with a group of college-bound students with a strong grasp of the fundamentals of the English language.

Eduhonesty: I am operating out of a suitcase right now, using my phone for posts. I promise I will fill in some details and documentation later. I just read the story about the woman in Hawaii yesterday, though, and I thought this might be a timely post. Our country’s leaders need to be clear that many very capable teachers may abandon our neediest schools if evaluations continue to be based on student performance. Wealthier districts not only pay better, they also deliver higher test scores most of the time. If I were starting over right now, I’d choose to work in a much different set of schools, schools where the children need me far less then they do in the district I just left.

Arne Duncan went to the University of Chicago Lab School. Incidentally, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s children attend the UCLS and the Obama daughters also attended before enrolling in the private Sidwell Friends School in Washington D.C. If the U.S. Secretary of Education wants to keep his kids out of the Chicago Public Schools, I understand that perfectly.

My kids went to school the best public district I could find for them. I might have considered a couple of high-quality alternatives, but great schools were non-negotiable when I went house hunting. I recommend that to my students when we talk about schools. I tell them, “You are better off in a much smaller house in a place with great schools. You want your kids to get the best education possible.”

Eduhonesty: In my view, Arne gets a pass on avoiding the schools he once led. I would send my own kids to the University of Chicago Lab School in his position.  I will observe that many leaders creating educational policy for America’s school districts don’t have much, if any, experience working in America’s problem schools. Too many of our leaders are steeped in theory and lacking in experience where it counts. Anyone deciding American education policy ought to have time as a teacher and/or administrator in a Title I school.

This snippet came from an article about Arne Duncan, our Secretary of Education, who is planning to send his kids to private schools in Chicago. (By Shontee Pant, Staff writer at csmonitor.com, July 10, 2015 )

From 1995 to 2005, the City of Chicago saw a 9.2 percent increase in the graduation rate to 51 percent of students entering high school graduating. In 2013, the percentage had increased to 65 percent. That same year, the average high school graduation rate across the United States was 81 percent.

The flip side of the above will be that 35% of the students in Chicago did not graduate. From http://cps.edu/About_CPS/At-a-glance/Pages/Stats_and_facts.aspx,

Student enrollment

Preschool: 22,873

Kindergarten: 28,978

Elementary (1-8): 232,825

Secondary (9-12): 112,007

That’s over 39,000 who won’t make it out of high school in this one major urban area. The numbers are far worse in Detroit.

Eduhonesty: The Chicago graduation numbers suggest a real improvement. In the sense that high school graduation has historically increased earning power, Chicago’s students unquestionably have a win here. We are getting better at keeping kids inside the school system. That 39,000 tells us we are a long ways from out of the tunnel, though.

Please check out my last post before reading this one. I joked about recording bathroom breaks as data on spreadsheets. More data! I laid out the basic opportunity-cost problem with gathering data on bathroom breaks, but I need to carry this exercise in what-ifs a little further.

So my fellow teachers and I start recording bathroom breaks. An interruption here, an interruption there, and pretty soon my thought processes may have holes the size of canyons in them. That’s my first problem, one I faced regularly when students spoke up wanting to read the words on their latest 500 words list.

My larger problem will be future interventions. When we gave benchmark tests this year (8 total), we recorded results for six of these tests in different spreadsheets. That data was then analyzed to determined who should receive extra help or interventions. Lower students were assigned to afterschool tutoring. Next year, those scores will affect their classroom placements. Students with the lowest scores are expected to receive no elective class of their choice due to placement in remedial classes designed to help with their academic deficits.

If my district started tracking bathroom breaks, interventions would follow. Teachers would have to wean “Oscar” from the bathroom after they determined he was spending 37 minutes each day on average hiding out in the boy’s room. Teachers would be expected to call home, probably a number of homes — repeatedly. If Oscar complained he desperately needed that bathroom pass throughout the school day, the nurse would likely have to send home a letter suggesting his parents take him to see a urologist. The nurse would then have to track these letters, and there might be quite a few of them. Boys and girls bathrooms in my former school are busy places.

Teachers might have to attend team meetings to plan out bathroom schedules for individual students and then address the issue of school rules used to address exceptions. How do we determine an emergency? Should we log emergencies? What consequences will we have for an excessive number of emergencies? What exactly is an excessive number of emergencies? Should girls receive special dispensations due to their monthly cycles? How will we deal with boys claiming discrimination? (I guarantee you that some Oscar or another would pipe up to say, “But you let Kimberly go for the last three days!”) When should we call home? The meeting might bog down, as ambitious new teachers and administrators argue larger issues: Is the passing period too short? Should we schedule a mid-morning break? If so, how will we avoid taking time from specific classes and not others? Should we have a rotating break? How will we determine break times? Should we advance the break time by ten minutes each day? How will we track this? Who will be responsible for the new bathroom break schedule tracking spreadsheet? If we share the responsibility, who will create the schedule showing when different teachers are responsible for the break schedule spreadsheet? At what time should we start these breaks? At what time should we cut them off? Do we need to liberalize the bathroom policy at lunch? What about bathroom vandalism? Should security be stationed near the bathrooms during break times? Should we allow water breaks too? How will we prevent disruption to classes that do not have a break scheduled? How will we manage breaks when we are testing? Etc. I can see this meeting in my mind and I can see myself trying to look attentive for well over an hour as we all hash out these issues, coming up with policies for some and tabling others while parceling out more noninstructional work.

I can visualize this whole damn meeting because I have sat through so many variants of this meeting. Data gathering leads to policy and interventions, which lead to meetings. And more meetings. As part of our efforts, staff will be expected to document and discuss improvements. So in a few months, we will be taking time out of the weekly seventh-grade meeting to discuss that fact that student bathroom usage has fallen 36% and our 17 identified problem students have decreased usage by a full 83%.

We might gain real benefits from this exercise in bathroom control. Classroom learning time will go up as bathroom usage goes down. But at what cost? How much time did it take to get those 17 kids on track? How much time was taken away from all of their classmates while we worked on this problem.

Eduhonesty: Good ideas run amuck are killing us out in the field here. ‘Nuff said.

In a previous post, I joked about recording bathroom breaks as data on spreadsheets. More data! The idea struck me as funny in part because I could see it happening. Why not? Upon reflection, I feel I should elaborate. A big issue is hiding under my pee sheet.

We had a program last year where students were supposed to read us 500 sight words correctly. We had to listen to each student in our homerooms* read lists of 50 words and then record student completion in a spreadsheet. Fifty words by fifty words, we made our way down the new word lists. Students who completed the entire task received a neon-green t-shirt. All teachers with “homerooms” participated whether they taught language arts or not. All teachers lost class time to listening to students read words, one by one.

The 500 words program was not a bad idea per se. Students in my district suffer from vocabulary deficits that interfere with their long-term academic success. I gave up class time toward a greater good. I gave up hours of class time. Here’s a sample spreadsheet from one teacher and one class. Every one of those little “x” entries represents the teacher sitting with a student and listening to that student read 50 words. The below spreadsheet was downloaded from the original Google Doc. I cut off the tabs below that show all the teachers names. Seventh grade alone required eleven spreadsheet pages. Sixth and eighth worked on their own spreadsheets.

Was the 500 words program useful? Certainly. Was it worth the instructional time loss? That’s debatable. The program added to the already high level of frantic in my math classes as I tried to teach and keep up with those required weekly quizzes that other people were writing for me. I didn’t have any time to lose, but my time kept bleeding away regardless.

Would the bathroom spreadsheet be useful? Certainly. Middle school and high school teachers would benefit from tracking and timing the sometimes hourly trips to the bathroom by “Oscar,” for example. Some of these frequent bathroom flyers should either see the Dean or a urologist. Tracking this time would enable teachers to keep students in class who are missing too much class time now.

I’m afraid if I suggested this idea, though, some administrator might actually put my bathroom spreadsheet into play. Like the 500 words, I would have created one more time demand on already frazzled teachers who are sacrificing instruction to reporting requirements every day. Help! Help! We are drowning in good ideas out here and I suspect our situation will continue to worsen. As we hire teaching coaches and new administrators to teach teachers how to teach, we create these “bathroom” spreadsheets. If I were a coach, I’d have to justify my pay. Since I would not be teaching — many coaches don’t — I’d have oodles of time to come up with good ideas to improve my school, new programs to rob time from old programs and, most importantly, from instruction.

We don’t have enough time now. Not enough time to meet all the standards. Not enough time to prepare for all the required tests and quizzes. Not nearly enough time to do the remedial work that students in academically-struggling districts require.

My bathroom spreadsheet struck me as a perfect example of the problem. If I ran this by administration, they might sign off. The information would be useful. We could then design interventions for students who are the using the bathroom to skip class in bits and pieces. Only where do the interventions stop? Where do we draw the line and say, “I have six good hours to teach during a day and these spreadsheets and interventions are stealing minutes and even sometimes hours from that teaching time.”

Eduhonesty: I come back to opportunity cost, one of the biggest elephants in the education room today. When I am listening to students read words to me, what math or science am I not teaching? When I am tracking bathroom breaks, who am I not helping with their classwork? When I am sitting at one of my too-many spreadsheets, who is teaching my students?

*Technically we did not have homerooms last year. We called our first period class homeroom and made only essential announcements at the start of this time, so the 500 words activity took place almost entirely during class time, with a few exceptions at the start or end of the day.

From the article “Screen Addiction Is Taking a Toll on Children”

The text of the following email is from my former math department chair, and is used in the previous post. I thought I needed to pull out one more topic from this short email.

The link below provides a series of tutorial videos that would be appropriate to assign to students to watch who were absent. You could document that as an intervention and say that it was provided for students to view on their own time or make time available during the school day for students to view it while you move forward with other students.

http://www.virtualnerd.com/pre-algebra/ratios-proportions/scale-models/scale-model-examples

Eduhonesty: “You could document that as an intervention …,”  she writes. This snippet brings out an aspect of government oversight that does not hit the table often enough. We are documenting interventions furiously. Documentation requirements keep rising, both for classes and individual students. At this rate, soon we will be keeping spreadsheets recording the exact time and length of all student bathroom breaks.

The opportunity cost of this documentation keeps growing as time demands created by that documentation balloon around us. I cannot prepare lessons while I am tracking individual interventions for everybody who is behind, which amounted to absolutely everybody in my math classes last year, at least if we compare their standardized test scores to last year’s PARCC expectations. The time taken to create documentation has to come from somewhere. Especially at the middle school and high school level, where teachers may teach 150 students or more, and usually teach over 100 if they are responsible for regular classes, that time will sometimes or even often be taken from instructional preparation. No other outcome is possible.

The instruction still happens, of course. But maybe science teachers do a shortened version of the experiment or skip the lab entirely because they can’t find time to do the set-up work. Maybe a PowerPoint ends up less carefully crafted because the teacher making that PowerPoint spent hours writing up interventions instead. Maybe a math activity gets cancelled because the teacher does not have time to count out all the little paper strips she needs to work on those fractions. Or the activity takes 50 minutes instead of 30 because the teacher ends up using to students to do prep work she would have done herself if she had not been producing mountains of data for administrators instead.

Eduhonesty: Opportunity costs from data gathering efforts are among the largest, invisible elephants sharing the room with us.

P.S. That “bathroom break” Google Doc spreadsheet would be useful, actually, if not for the time requirements involved. Some students take a break every class if they can. These students may lose hours each week to bathroom breaks, 5 to 10 minutes at a time. When teachers push back, those teachers face repeated interruptions of, “But it’s an emergency!” Girls can always call on lunar phases, too, invoking the time of the month excuse. No one fights back on that one, especially the guys.