I just ran the average grade level for the students that I teach. In math, that level is 4.06, meaning that students are scoring at the beginning of the fourth grade on the MAP test. In reading, they are scoring at 3.04, or the beginning of the third grade. I lumped both my groups together. If I separate them, the results are more problematic. One class is substantially below the other. Technically, these kids are in the seventh grade.

What books are at the third grade lexile level? The Captain Underpants series qualifies, along with the Berenstain Bears and the Zack Files.

Here’s the first page from tomorrow’s test:

I did not write this test. No one in my school did. The required outside consultants that came with our government grant wrote the test. Overall, the test looks decent enough, but I’d like to ask readers to think about reading that test if they read at a first or second grade level. If the mean average for reading in my student group falls at the beginning of third grade, that means the group has a fair number of first and second grade readers. The range actually runs from first grade to fifth grade. Only one student scored as high as fifth grade.

I have to give this test tomorrow. I expect an epic fail despite the time we spent working on the relevant vocabulary and concepts, even if I take time to tell the class what land conservation laws are and how this might relate to hiking. One reason I expect my fail is simpler than vocabulary, though. I’ll ask readers to try to solve the second question on this test. That question’s far from a no-brainer and, honestly, while it may have a “best sample,” every one of those answers is half-daft. Unfortunately, this is question number two, setting the tone for the whole test. At this early point, I expect a number of kids to enter that deer-in-the-headlights state of despair that leads to panic and random guesses.

I’ve had a week to work on this material. It’s not enough. They need more time. But we are all supposed to give the same tests at about the same time and I am already one day late. The train never stops. The train will not stop for me. I have to give this test tomorrow. Then I expect I will “lose” a day going over what went wrong so we can get ready for the retake that fits nowhere in my time budget. But 100% of these kids’ grades are based on these tests so the retake will be a necessity.

Week after week after week, I have been giving these tests and picking people up after they fell. How much resilience can I demand of these kids? How much resilience can I demand of myself? But when I tried to talk to my Assistant Principal about this issue — more than once — I ended up being told that he found my lack of faith in my students disturbing. (I can hear Lord Vader.) The implication was always that I must not know how to do my job and I’d say he’s right. I don’t know how to do this job anyway.

I find my Assistant Principal’s lack of faith in the copious quantities of data that he and the administration have been amassing all year to be simply… inexplicable. How does he expect first grade readers to do this test? What kind of scaffolding/remediation/tutoring does he expect to fill in the gaps? I have been tutoring and sending kids to others for more tutoring. But at the end of the day, that tutoring and scaffolding might as well be Band-Aids on third degree burns.

Eduhonesty: I have been told that I must use the materials provided to me. Almost none of my students can read those materials. I have been told I must keep up with the regular population. I can only do that at the expense of repetition. Without that repetition, I believe retention will be scant, and test scores appear to be bearing me out as the year progresses. I can tell when my students are learning and I’ve never seen a year where so little actual learning occurred, even when I can laser in and get students ready for that weekly test.

To use a metaphor that explains why I have to retire: I feel as if I have been forced to open a puppy mill filled with lost, sad puppies trapped in cages. Those windows to the world in an earlier post today? My puppy mill has no windows. Only endless chances to get beat on the head with test papers for failing to do the right puppy thing, a thing that no one has properly modeled, taught or explained. I am so sorry for the puppies I will be leaving behind, but I can’t do this.

I don’t think they can find anyone who can, frankly. But some corporation is running this operation and they want us to use the same materials and present the same material at the same time. No one will let me go to the library or the internet to find the right materials or let me take the time to do the needed remedial training. Oh, I can go to the library or internet to get those materials to share, but I don’t have close to enough time now so extra materials do me no good — and I am not allowed to substitute, only supplement during blocks of nonexistent time.

Eduhonesty; I understand that next year the corporation and district administration will allow bilingual and special education to adapt materials. Anyone looking at this year’s data can see that one-size-fits-all surely did not fit the bilingual and special education students. No one should have needed to gather a year’s data to find that out, either.

“Books were my window on the world. Growing up at the Elephant and Castle, which was very rough, my paradise was the library.”
Michael Caine

Books remain windows to the world for so many of us. We store our hopes, our interests, our dreams and our escapes in bookcases, waiting for free moments to dive into pages that provide us with succor and flight, diversion, learning and enlightenment. The more we read, the larger our personal worlds become.

My school’s library is about to be shut for renovation for the rest of the year. A well-known, local corporation has offered to refresh my school’s little collection of aged books. Renovations are greatly needed so I am not complaining. If I get a chance this week, maybe I will go look for that book on African-Americans that I stumbled on last year. My favorite quote, “Negroes may even be your teachers.” We need new books.

I hope the library will have a bank of computers next year — currently it has two — as well as updated materials. I regret the spring closing of the library. Still, any plan to update the library has my backing. I’ll add to my to-do list the need to talk to language arts teachers about pushing town library cards. Too many students here have no books in their homes. I wish we could renovate the library during the summer, given that my district already has severe reading challenges, but this upcoming closure likely results from corporate vacation schedules.

Eduhonesty: Any nitpicking here aside, I’m extremely happy about the library remodeling.

Taken from an administrative email: “Questions have come up about using the computer labs during the MAP testing window. Unfortunately we will not be able to use the labs. Technology has advised us not to use it because of bandwidth.”

The testing window runs from April 13th to April 22nd. Readers need to understand that the school’s laptops are being assigned to students for testing. Rooms do not have computers for students with a few special education exceptions. My colleague down the hall has two desktops in addition to her own machine, for example. We just took the student body offline for 8 days, except for testing.

Teaching casts long shadows. I taught this girl six years ago now. She sat at the end of a table, sneaking in reading time, fat books unrelated to the science fiction elective that I taught at the end of the school day. I watched her read and began to buy her books. She came in and cleaned my room every so often, probably to pay me back for the books. She began coming to my afterschool groups and my class parties, that year and the following year. Mostly, I taught bilingual classes but we included this girl in our groups. I could not be happier for my new soldier, who sent me a handwritten letter, obviously written in bits at different times. Some of the handwriting looks exhausted. “The food here is tolerable,” she says, a bit after letting me know she had qualified with grenades. Your soldier, she signed the letter.

Eduhonesty: The eduhonesty blog feels too negative sometimes because I am critiquing my life in education, tracking problems such as excessive testing and meeting times. This post helps put the life of a teacher in perspective. I love this picture and the letter that came with it. I am so proud of this girl.

I watched happy kids slug down vanilla frappuccinos from Starbucks today. The Museum of Science and Industry has a Starbucks conveniently located near an elevator. I watched them share candies and flaming red snack food later. I took the below pic of a student lunch during Saturday tutoring:

Eduhonesty: Michelle Obama has taken on one big supervillain. Deliciousness can be hard to defeat.

My last post dealt with “Rick,” my union rep. We had a discussion on the merits of the new retention — or, rather, lack of retention — policy in my school. Fail or no fail, we appear to plan to pass them on to the next grade. I’m not against the policy per se. I can see a certain fairness in it. We shifted the whole ground under the kids this year. Suddenly, they had multiple tests weekly. Suddenly, outsiders set the level of those tests, without having known these students. Unreadable tests became common. Failing grades soared, including those in my own gradebook.

Eduhonesty: For this year, a blanket pass may represent justice rather than mercy.

Too much spam. I barely have time to write posts on top of grading and other responsibilities. It’s still possible to comment but no longer so easy. Sorry.

One A.M. meeting about a software program, running one hour and ten minutes. I left a little early because I needed to make copies before my next class. Total planning period time: Ten minutes! One P.M. meeting, running one hour and five minutes. The first twenty-five minutes were on the MAP test we are going to start giving to the whole school starting next week. A few minutes were also dedicated to the PARCC test, scheduled for the end of April and start of May. The remaining minutes took place in a department meeting on the topic of the AIMSWEB and MAP tests. These tests are overlapping. Some discussion revolved around the desirability of separating the tests so we don’t completely nuke students with exams. I pointed out that at least a couple of boys in my classes were likely to just start circling answers or clicking on letters randomly (depending on the test) if we did not give them some break from testing. Others agreed. The Department Chair promised to bring the issue up with the Principal. We also discussed a new plan in which teachers will go into each other’s classes to watch lessons and critique those lessons. At first, teachers will receive forewarning. Then teachers will add to the surprise visits already made by administrators and mysterious state officials. These new visits will come out of our — I laugh as I type the following words — planning time.

I spent most of my minutes in the first, afternoon meeting trying to calm a colleague, “Dana,” who is honestly frightened of all these new, computerized tests. She is afraid she will somehow mess up. Another colleague and I came up with suggestions to help “Dana” get ready, such as observing a math teacher in another grade who will begin her testing cycle first. We promised to go through the six or eight pages of instructions for the test with “Dana.” I promised to print out another, different set of instructions. I’m hoping the guy across the hall will create a cheat sheet for getting the test started. He’s good at that kind of thing.

My third afternoon meeting was cancelled due to the absence of the Department Head for that subject. That cut total meeting time down to 2 hours and fifteen minutes. With the usual third meeting, we would have spent at least one-half hour longer in the building. Meeting time might then have broken three hours.

Testing made for fractious end of day exchanges.

“We just got done fucking testing,” a usually calm and articulate colleague emoted after school.

“This is fucking ridiculous,” another usually calm colleague exclaimed to me while going downstairs between meetings.

“This is stupid,” my seat partner said to me during the last meeting.

In previous years, we had a lot less cursing. I just try to cheer everyone up.

“Nonsense,” I say, “there can never be too much testing. I love weird, new tests that take up all my instructional time.” Sometimes I say, “There can never be too many meetings! We might actually get something done.” I smile broadly. Mostly, they smile back. You might as well keep smiling. You have to keep going to meetings. Given that I plan to escape these tempestuous seas, I probably could start skipping meetings but I won’t. I feel a need to keep my hands on the oars, helping to row our little lifeboats toward happier shores.

Eduhonesty: I’ll start keeping track of the testing minutes next week. It seems I just finished that count but the cycle is about to begin anew. At this rate, in a few years we will hardly have to teach students at all. We will just spend the year testing them. Afterwards, we can conduct numerous, long meetings about how little they seem to know, suggesting strategies for fixing the situation that no one has time to implement because they are too busy testing and going to meetings.

I start to type in “sample bias worksheets” and Google obligingly offers me a few extra alternatives, doing that google-thing where it adds words to help you find common searches. The third item down is “sample bias worksheets for kindergarten” and I click on that link. There are also “sample bias worksheets for kindergarten” in images.

Eduhonesty: We can’t really be that nuts, can we?

(I went to look. It’s not that bad. Here’s a bit of food for thought, found on Google:)

The studies show that retained students do not do as well in life as those students who are socially promoted. The studies miss an important point, though — one that desperately needs to be put on the radar. We know the effect of retaining students on students retained. We have been tracking this phenomenon for decades. What we don’t know is the effect of retention on the nonretained.

What happens when students watch failing students get promoted to the next grade? That effect of retention — or lack of retention — on regular students exists, and we cannot assume the magnitude of the effect is trivial. Students watch and learn from each other. They sometimes consider consequences in making behavioral decisions. A perfect example is the Illinois Constitution test. Illinois state law requires Constitution tests in middle school and again in high school. Students must pass to move on to the next grade. I have given these tests at both the middle school and high school level. (I do have an absurd number of endorsements for readers who are trying to figure out my backstory.) In the high school, we scheduled evening study sessions in the local library. Students sprawled across the floor, sat in chairs or propped themselves up against chairs as we studied for that test. Motivation was extremely high. Bilingual and ESL students especially take this one requirement seriously because they have been told they must pass the Constitution test to graduate. No other test or even final exam generates close to the same level of effort and motivation.

Expectations affect academic effort. If students expect they must pass a Constitution test to get their diploma, they will learn the provisions of the Constitution. If students think F grades may deprive them of a chance to go on to the next grade with their peers, at least some students will put in extra effort to make sure they don’t get that F. Unfortunately, we can’t put a number to this effect. How many students have been saved from flunking because “Ramses” flunked and his friends and cousins all became more academically serious after seeing how much “Ramses” hated repeating the eighth grade?

What happens when we promote everyone to the next grade, regardless of academic effort and achievement? What is the message we just passed on to the average Joe or Joanna? Our high achievers are likely to continue to be high achievers. The research nicely documents the fact that high achievers in middle school tend to remain high achievers. But what about those students with the 2.0 GPA who write 3 sentences when 5 are expected? Who lose their pencils and books regularly but who still chug along asking for more pencils and turning in mostly finished assignments? What message do they take with them when we pass along that student who failed multiple classes?

Those lower-scoring students will get the message. The grapevine where I work functions well, in part because we have many large families. I asked a girl today about her siblings and found out she has five brothers and one sister. That’s not uncommon in my school. I always keep coloring books around for parent-teacher conferences. Many families are interconnected. We have a lot of cousins in our classrooms. Many times, I have heard students tell friends about what happened to their “cousin” (or brother, sister, etc.) who failed the previous year. If nothing happened, that information gets filed away.

There are kids who will always try and always do well. There are kids who bring so much baggage to the table that best efforts may not prevent their failing. My concern is for the kids in the middle, the kids who are savvy enough to listen to the stories of the preceding year and base their behavior on the expectations created by those stories, the kids who may let an F or two slip by because any costs or consequences from that lack of academic diligence don’t seem terribly large or important.

When we pass everyone on, we pass on a profound message that grades don’t matter much, if at all.