“Ms. Q, is it true that you get a lot of money to hold the pole when they are fixing the roads?”

We talked careers today. Part of the challenge for my district could be heard in the subtexts of that conversation. Union roofer was one favored option, along with other careers in construction. Garbageman was another known source of good pay. Prostitute came in a distant third. I weighed in on the risks and short life for that career. Stylist had fans, as did professional athlete.

For years, teachers have been pushing professional careers at these students. Those efforts don’t seem to have amounted to much. I discussed the high salaries in healthcare. As soon as law came up, my class shot it down. Seven years of college was absurd. Anything that required more than two years of college ran into trouble, although elementary school teacher remained on some lists. Two-year options received at least a short nod. Dental hygienist did not get shot down coming out of the gate anyway.

Eduhonesty: These kids have had a rough year, a year of test after test that they could barely understand. They don’t like school itself much now. I suspect they like it less than they did last year. If we want to sell higher education, we need to start looking more closely at the psychological effects of testing. I’ve never, ever had a group that aspired to so little. In the past, I usually received a few answers like doctor, lawyer or architect. Today, they asked about the amount of college required to be an elementary school teacher and at least one student, after hearing that a full four years of college might be required, decided she would prefer to be a hair stylist.

In no way am I suggesting that garbageman or union roofer are not honorable careers. The world needs stylists. But that career conversation was nonetheless disheartening. My students simply did not want to be in school. Breathing in a cloud of dust while standing all day holding a heavy pole, as jackhammers rattled their teeth and eardrums, sounded more appealing than staying in school for an extra two years.

A pretty girl up front emerged from her usual impassive indifference to grin at me and agree that the world was a weird place, too weird for selling your body on 10th street. That topic of conversation caught her interest in a way that magma, lava and rocks had not. Suddenly, this quiet little girl met me with an engaged, worldly viewpoint that is still giving me pause some seven hours later. That college talk that we are all selling? No one in the class I talked to this afternoon appeared to be buying.

We need to figure out to what extent testing may be part of these shifting and declining dreams and expectations. If I’m right, opportunity costs from lost instructional time may be only a small part of the crisis our too-often-blind search for data may be creating. It’s hard to sell studying, homework and academic-improvement to a kid whose favorite plan is turning a sign from stop to slow and back to stop again — although I guess I should be grateful that’s all my girl wanted to do with a pole. My students trust me. It’s probably a good sign that exotic dancer only hit the list as a brief note that sounded like a joke.

In the last week or two, we have added six new special education students. We have added regular students, too. To our knowledge, none of these students represent military transfers. The military tends to allow its parents to finish out school years before transfers. We are a relatively small school.

Who are these parents? What are they thinking? One speculation in the teacher’s lounge intrigued me. At least locally, families tend to know that my district does not retain students and I am sure the news has spread that we are not retaining students this year. Faced with a child’s being held back, some families might opt to move into a district where their child does not have to repeat any grades.

Some of these transfers came from some distance away, though. They are not part of the revolving door of student moves between our suburb and nearby suburbs to the North who regularly exchange students with us. These moves are mysteries.

Frequently, late-arriving students are disruptive. The family may be changing schools specifically because of behavior problems. We lost one girl from my classes this year after she ran away with gang friends, causing her family to decide to separate her from her local peer group. Even new students who were not sources of trouble in their previous districts may become challenges when suddenly plunged into a new school, away from old friends and families. New students are often angry at their loss. They act out to attract the attention of possible new friends. They may also find themselves hopelessly confused academically — especially if sudden school moves are part of a family pattern.

Eduhonesty: This shifting of student sands does not occur where I live, not in the same order of magnitude anyway. The parents in this middle-class suburb tend to finish out school years before changing locations. If dad or mom is transferred, the remaining parent will often stay behind until June before reuniting the family. To maintain two households requires money, however. Where I work, the only way “Jamie” may get to stay in her school will probably be an aunt or relative who lives in district. When we compare America’s school districts, this higher mobility in financially-disadvantaged areas only rarely hits the radar. That mobility can have a significant impact on learning and test scores, however. The special education classes in my school are struggling to absorb new students now, at a time when we are supposed to be getting ready for end of year tests. How these new kids will do on tests is anybody’s guess at the moment.

Soon, I’ll be able to attempt some estimate of a final tally. I’m pretty sure nearly one-tenth of my year has been sacrificed to standardized testing or testing created by outsiders based on a curriculum that matches none of my student’s actual learning levels. Test after incomprehensible test, I hacked away at my students’ self-esteem.* They failed. We met at McDonalds on Saturdays and they retook tests. They retook tests after school and before school. Tests, tests, tests. Retake by retake, a number of them worked to salvage grades. Others did not, however. Others just took their punches and went down without a fight.

The year is ending and I echo the sentiment of a great man from America’s past:

Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

Chief Joseph

According to the Chairman of the Bilingual Department in my school, 27 of the district’s 34 bilingual teachers will be leaving, voluntarily or involuntarily, at the end of this year. That’s essentially 80% of the total. My district will probably be forced to hire any bilingual candidate who walks in the door this summer. Given that we are a lower-paying, understaffed, high-stress district, the odds that next year’s bilingual staff will be as good as this year’s staff are maybe better than that snowballs chance in hell, but I’d put my money on the snowball.

Eduhonesty: But did district administration do anything to keep their bilingual staff? If so, I sure missed those efforts. The Chairman and I laughed over our good fortune — her new job and my retirement. I still love my students. I still love teaching. But I am relieved to join the exodus. Administrative, testing, and data demands have become absurd.

I have previously put forth my opinion that true differentiated instruction requires the ability to use and teach different materials. This year, I have been required to teach exactly the same math to all my students. I am allowed to work on remedial math in blocks of essentially nonexistent time, especially if I can somehow do this in small groups, but my students are all supposed to take the exact same probability test at the end of the week. They all take the same unit tests designed by a group of outside consultants as well. I think this same-material-for-everybody approach is bonkers.

From today’s instruction, I offer this example to show in a nutshell why one-size-does-not-fit-all. The two middle-school students below are in the same class with me twice a day, once for math and once for science:

Student A: Ms. Q, if there are bacteria on Mars, would they be dangerous to us if we went there?

Student B (while we were tossing coins, making a probability chart): Ms. Q, which one is heads and which one is tails?

Eduhonesty: My scary unit tests results don’t surprise me much, if at all. I’m managing to teach a great deal of the required math for the year. But some kids are not ready for that grade-level math. Trust me.

I have learned in my years of teaching that kids can often pronounce multisyllabic words perfectly without understanding what they are saying. These acts of mimicry convince teachers that vital reading skills have been acquired until the tests and quizzes start to roll in. I’m not sure how kids reach the seventh grade unable to decipher book content once the pictures are removed, but I do know this: We desperately need more remedial reading programs.

We need to teach reading to students until they can read. Currently, we pass students along into language arts classes where they are lost, unable to access the content needed to pass their tests. We place them in art and band classes that provide welcome escapes, but at the expense of hours that might help these students cross the reading threshold. We need to stop creating these one-size-fits-all curricula molded into one-size-fits-all schedules.

If we want to understand how students can graduate from high school unable to effectively read a newspaper or fill out a job application, these reading-light curricula and schedules should be added to the list of reasons.

Eduhonesty: I can already hear the objections.

“We give them plenty of materials to read!” Various district leaders might reply.

I’d like to answer that objection. An unreadable book might as well be no book. When our desire for “rigor” results in the purchase of books whose lexile level renders those books indecipherable, we are wasting our students’ time and our own time — and we are also wasting a great deal of money, the money that might have been spent on more accessible books instead.

Reading comes naturally to many children, but other children need help to master this essential life skill. We need to specifically teach reading. We can’t hope that our children will become readers simply because we thrust books into their hands. The wrong books not only don’t help, they may do harm. I am convinced those indecipherable books create nonreaders.

How long has the district been out of paper? I have been asking teachers to try to remember. Around a month might be a good guess. No one’s sure, though. We have been bringing in our own paper for quite awhile now. One teacher told me that we had borrowed paper from another district. That’s an interesting rumor anyway. I’m no investigative reporter and I’m not sure how much of my valuable time I want to give to the paper issue, but I do want to make one observation: The same people creating my district’s plans for the future managed to use up all their paper about two months before the end of school, and possibly some weeks before that. This fact does not inspire confidence.

Common pedagogical fashion favors small group work right now. I have fought this battle for the longest time. I have tried and tried to group since multiple sources warned me my evaluation depended on people seeing a split-up class, with grouped students helping each other. Only my students are so far behind the freshly-created, outsider-based, required curriculum that they can’t do small groups well — when they can do them at all.

For the introduction of new material, whole group instruction is wholly appropriate. No one in administration would listen when I repeated that practically everything I was required to present was new material — often material without foundations, which also needed to be presented. So I grouped and I ended up with a lot of kids off task and a lot of time wasted.

I have had a long, tiring year. Computers finally saved me on the small group score, allowing me to present the right picture to onlookers. Some months into the year, we received software programs; groups could use the software while other groups worked with me to learn the main concepts for the day. This meant that I gave the main lesson three times when I had a vocabulary station and twice when I did not. Students worked on the computers and then moved to other stations. The new math software program started above my students’ learning levels — with one documented exception — so this system did not work as well as it might have, but at least my groups did not appear ridiculous. They weren’t the most efficient use of my pedagogical time, however.

Eduhonesty: Frankly, when students know so little of the required content, letting them teach each other regularly seems like pedagogical malpractice to me. But what do I know? I just work here.

P.S. Among other considerations, when I give the main lesson three times, I must shorten that lesson. Even if I give a great 20 minute mini-lesson each time, I can’t pack as much information and practice into 20 minutes as I can into 35 or 40 minutes. My students then necessarily are deprived of possible instructional time, an opportunity cost that cannot be recovered.

We were talking about standardized testing and some issues were put on the table that don’t often hit this blog. Because I teach in a lower-scoring, financially-disadvantaged district, my posts often deal with issues particular to this milieu. In the district where I work, we are trying to bring our ACT’s up so that more students from the district reach that 21 or so that suggests a student may be able to survive college coursework.

This girl had a 27*, a score that can get her into the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and many other fine schools. Her worries are different. She believes her score has been impacted by that fact that she is a slower and more meticulous test-taker. That’s entirely likely. ACT tests are designed so that students often don’t finish a section.

I’ll call this girl “Angie.” Angie objected to the accommodations that gave other students extra time. English-language learners and special education students may get extra time. Students with savvy Northshore parents may be entitled to extra time because their parents know how to work the system. I believe I could have gotten extra time for my younger child, for example, due to documented OCD issues, despite the fact that this child has always excelled academically to the point of being a National Merit Finalist. Parents in this upscale school district regularly hire tutors for their children. One child who used to regularly visit my house had five tutors until dad finally got her score up to 27. We take the ACT seriously in this suburb.

Eduhonesty: Upon short reflection, I added this issue to my list of reasons why high-stakes testing has gotten far too much public support. Ironically, as we attempt to level the playing field for urban and/or financially disadvantaged students, we are actually creating a system that puts these students at a further disadvantage. The students where I work don’t have the resources to hire tutor after tutor. Many parents in my work-district did not finish high school themselves. Unemployment and underemployment runs high here. Parents who have recently arrived from other countries especially don’t understand the pivotal role of the ACT in college applications — or in high school perceptions. Guidance counselors will provide an enormous amount of help to a child who scored 25 on the ACT, but very little help to a child who scored 16. One child has been tracked for possible college by a number. The other child plunged off that track when the score results came back.

I will note that a score of 16 indicates little chance of college success. As a former student once said, “I think they give you fifteen just for breathing.” But parents in my work-district too often don’t know how to help their kids fight for the numbers.
And in this data-driven, numbers-based culture that we are creating, numbers can be destiny.

Angie understands how the numbers work. She is going to be fine, although she has a legitimate complaint. But I look at the many parents where I live who do not hesitate to pony up $60 per hour or more for tutors to help with daily coursework, regular tests and standardized tests, and I see a gaping inequity, one that can’t be covered by occasional afternoons of free, afterschool tutoring given to whole groups rather than specific individuals. Kids in my neighborhood go into the testing game with loaded dice and the money to take second, third, fourth, and fifth chances at tests that cost. (Kids who qualify financially may get up to two fee waivers for the ACT while in high school, requiring the help of a school counselor. This covers basic testing costs, but no additional costs and no extra score reports.)

Parents where I live don’t hesitate to spend hundreds of dollars to increase ACT numbers. They also pay to deliver higher GPAs and SAT-specific content-learning. Parents where I work are often forced to spend that money on food and rent instead. As we emphasize numbers, numbers, numbers, we provide a natural advantage to those who can afford tutors — and one more barrier for those who cannot.

*The ACT maximum is 36.