Author Archives: admin

About admin

First written in 2012(?): Just how old is this thing??? Back then, during a too-short school year, I taught relentlessly. During evenings and week-ends, I graded, called families and planned lessons. I swerved around patches of glass in the parking lot, the first step in my journey up chipped stairs to a classroom covered in eclectic posters that hid patchy, scraped-up walls. I wrote about beloved students, almost all recipients of free breakfasts and lunches, who were entitled to a better education than they were receiving. In this blog, I have documented some of the reasons behind recent educational breakdowns. Sometimes, I just vented. 2017: Retired and subbing, I continue to explore the mystery of how we did so much damage to our schools in only a few decades. Did no one teach the concepts of opportunity costs or time management to US educational reformers? A few courses in child psychology and learning would not have hurt, either. Vygotsky anyone? Piaget? Dripping IV lines are hooked up to saccharine versions of the new Kool-Aid, spread all over the country now; many legislators, educational administrators and, yes, teachers are mainlining that Kool-Aid, spewing pedagogical nonsense that never had any potential for success. Those horrendous post-COVID test score discrepancies? They were absolutely inevitable and this blog helps explain why. A few more questions worth pondering: When ideas don't work, why do we continue using them? Why do we keep giving cruel, useless tests to underperforming students, month after grueling month? How many people have been profiting financially from the Common Core and other new standards? How much does this deluge of testing cost? On a cost/benefit basis, what are we getting for our billions of test dollars? How are Core-related profits shifting the American learning landscape? All across America, districts bought new books, software, and other materials targeted to the new tests based on the new standards. How appropriate were those purchases for our students? Question after question after question... For many of my former students, some dropouts, some merely lost, the answers will come too late. If the answers come at all. I just keep writing. Please read. Please use the search function. Travel back in time with me. I have learned more than I wanted to know along my journey. I truly can cast some light into the darkness.

Looking through the cracks

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To retain or not retain — that is the question. Should we flunk our underperformers? If we do, should we hold them back? Or send them on the next grade with a hope, a prayer and — if we listen to the research — extra tutoring? Academic studies favor social promotion, usually adding the caveat that the socially promoted should receive extra tutoring when they enter the next grade. Unfortunately, that tutoring may not happen or may be wholly insufficient: Two extra hours of instruction per week cannot begin to cover the losses from years of failure and near-failure. I’m not sure 10 hours a week could hit that target, but ten hours might be plausible for quick learners.

This post is only peripherally about retention, though. I want to briefly visit another topic. So Napoleon has failed or nearly failed his classes, quite likely not for the first time. At least one possible rescue ought to go on the table immediately, one that inexplicably may not be raised for discussion.

For parents and teachers: If Napoleon failed or has been skirting failure, please consider special education. When a parent demands that a child be tested for special education, the district must comply. Absent that demand, sometimes testing never happens. For one thing, the barriers to entering special education keep getting higher. I don’t want to start addressing those issues — they’re huge — but the amount of proof required to move a student into special education may shut the process down before it starts, especially as districts keep adding responsibilities to the teaching day. My 27 days of meetings this year take a lot of time away from possible parent calls or social worker discussions.

One of my students just entered special education. Her mom had mentioned she thought the girl needed extra help and I thought so, too. I talked to special education teachers. They told me the same thing they have been telling me for the last few years: Tell the parent to insist that her child needs to be tested. The amount of documentation a teacher requires to get that ball rolling is so daunting now that I suspect only parent interventions are likely to work in some districts. She’s not my only student who I think needs help. I have one more mission before year’s end, if I can put it together in the time that’s left.

For some kids, special education may be their only chance to graduate from high school and possibly move on to higher education. My colleague down the hall has been educated and trained specifically to work with academically and behaviorally-disadvantaged students. She has classes with eight or fewer children in them and a paraprofessional to help her. She can sit down and focus on one child, providing intensive instruction, while other children work with the paraprofessional. For any kid who is struggling to pass, year after year, my colleague’s class offers a chance to succeed.

Eduhonesty: Economic forces are in play here, something teachers and parents don’t always understand. Districts have a big incentive to keep children in the regular classroom. That special education teacher costs as much or more than her regular education counterpart, probably more since special education endorsements require quite a few college credits — this varies by area — and greater numbers of college credits usually lead to higher pay. Depending on law and contracts, one regular teacher can teach the same number of students as three special education teachers. Putting a child into special education thus represents a financial commitment that poor districts, especially, may prefer to avoid.

I need to observe that educators and administrators tend to be ethical people, dedicated to providing the best education possible to their students. While an obvious financial incentive exists to keep students out of special education, parties to the process are extremely unlikely to falsify testing data. Still, financial factors may lead to data interpretations designed to keep students in regular classrooms. A few years back, I had a student tested for special education. The man who tested her determined that her I.Q. was 78 — 3 digits too high to qualify for special education. She needed a 75 to qualify. But while psychometricians generally regard IQ tests as having high statistical reliability, the fact is that the standard error of measurement for IQ tests is commonly considered to be about three points — the very difference that might have gotten my student into special education. That test can easily be three points off. They didn’t let my girl into special education. (Bilingual education saved this former student, but that’s another story. She did graduate. She may be stranded in a Spanglish world, and she can’t spell or do math for beans, but she diligently attended school, receiving enough credits to walk the stage.)

Am I rambling here? To go straight to my point, many of our failing kids will benefit from special education; however, parents and teachers may need to force the issue. Parents — don’t trust the schools to tell you if your child needs special education. If you suspect learning handicaps, demand that your district test your child. Teachers — the mantra of this time has become, “All children can succeed!” This cheery sound bite sounds appealing but fictions often do. Not all children can succeed in regular classrooms. If they could, we would never have created special education in the first place.

Lost and struggling students deserve to get the help they need. These small classes with individualized attention allow some students to learn when regular classes do not. My colleague down the hall has dedicated her life to teaching reading to students who need extra help to put the letters together. Parents and teachers sometimes hesitate to seek special education placements for fear of labeling a child slow, but special education often proves the best possible world for at least some of our boys and girls.

Leonard Cohen put it perfectly in his song, Anthem:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

It’s all about light, the light of learning. We are here to help our children learn to love learning. We do that best when we don’t force them to go faster and farther than they are ready to travel. We do that best when we hand them books they can read with a teacher who understands the pacing and parameters they require. We do that best when we accept and love them for who they are.

For “Rick” — who lives where he works

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“Rick” is my union rep. I haven’t used his services, but he takes his union position seriously. He doesn’t gossip. He’s smart and funny, a middle-aged, African-American man who eats what he wants against medical advice — trying every so often to fix his excesses with a salad or two — and sometimes says what he thinks. He’s got a gift of quiet. He listens. Every so often, he shares his thoughts.

We were talking about the new retention policy, which appears to be another version of “we don’t retain nobody, nohow.” As noted in other posts, I understand where this policy originates. The research supports social promotion. The socially promoted have better outcomes in school and life overall. That point’s no longer debatable, even given the sometimes shoddy nature of social science research.

Here’s what Rick said, though, in a viewpoint that deserves cyberspace and cybertime:

“The thing is, those people in the Board Office, they go home at night to Lake Forest or places like that. They don’t live here. They’re just passing the problem on and it’s no problem for them. They don’t see these teen-age kids who didn’t make it through high school and who can’t find a job. I see them. They are standing on the street corner outside my house. They have nothing to do. They’ve got no way to make money. They’ve got no prospects.”

Rick is a big guy and he carries a natural authority. But he’ll admit to being scared of those kids on the street corner. Those kids don’t have a lot to lose, he tells me. The numbers here are hard to tease out. Crime statistics for the area baffle local residents and have led to a number of articles on the trustworthiness of crime statistics reported by police departments. Our crime statistics, like our graduation statistics, are honestly hard to understand when you are viewing them from the local stage. If 500 people finish at a middle school and 200 graduate from the high school across the street, when the graduation rate is over one-half of students, what happened to the missing bodies on the stage?

Regardless of the numbers, I can see why Rick is worried. Gang activity runs rampant in this locale. Drug abuse has become standard fare. What do you do if you have no education, no job and no legitimate job prospects? The underground economy offers one way to scrounge up cash. We had a middle school student murdered a few years ago when he flashed a bunch of money at some older peers. I’d guess that money came from drugs. I don’t know for sure. I know I held crying teachers who had known the boy, helped them down long, sad hallways. I watched a school mourn a kid who had already begun moving toward that street corner, regularly skipping school and ignoring classes.

What happens when we pass Napoleon on from eighth grade to high school when he is reading at a fourth grade level and doing math at a third grade level? Statistically, we improve his odds of long-term success, according to the studies. But what are those odds of success? Mostly, they range from poor to abysmally awful.

How costly is the decision to drop out of high school? To quote the PBS article “Dropout Nation,” (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/education/dropout-nation/by-the-numbers-dropping-out-of-high-school/,

Consider a few figures about life without a diploma:

$20,241

The average dropout can expect to earn an annual income of $20,241, according to the U.S. Census Bureau (PDF). That’s a full $10,386 less than the typical high school graduate, and $36,424 less than someone with a bachelor’s degree.

12

Of course, simply finding a job is also much more of a challenge for dropouts. While the national unemployment rate stood at 8.1 percent in August, joblessness among those without a high school degree measured 12 percent. Among college graduates, it was 4.1 percent.

…

63

Among dropouts between the ages of 16 and 24, incarceration rates were a whopping 63 times higher than among college graduates, according to a study (PDF) by researchers at Northeastern University. To be sure, there is no direct link between prison and the decision to leave high school early. Rather, the data is further evidence that dropouts are exposed to many of the same socioeconomic forces that are often gateways to crime.

In Rick’s view, when we pass those kids along, we pass along our problems to the community — and he’s right. Those high school students who can’t read, write or multiply often drop out of high school. Year by year, our lowest performers may be digging themselves into deeper holes until we finally offer them an out, legally allowing them to exit school. Then many of these kids enter the underground economy, the only economy where they can make enough money to support their lives and habits.

Rick watches these kids on his street corner while administrators determining district retention policies drive safely home to comfortable, suburban houses in areas where the majority of high school kids move on to graduate from college.

Retention policy for this year

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During my time, my district’s retention policy has changed or been rethought every year. Some years, failing students are kept behind. Other years, all students are promoted regardless of their academic success or effort. I understand the dilemma. The research on retention suggests that flunking failing kids does not help their long-term academic success. Whether we promote these students or fail them, they tend to do badly in school and in later life. Overall, the best outcomes result from social promotion, from students sent on despite their lack of learning. Certainly, social promotion is easier on teachers. If Napoleon did not listen the first time he was in seventh grade, Napoleon hardly ever becomes raptly attentive the next time around. If anything, he tunes out. He’s heard that Civil War rap before and he wasn’t particularly interested last year, either. Having been separated from his peers, Napoleon may also become a behavioral handful as he shows off, trying to capture the attention and admiration of possible new friends and lunch partners. For that matter, Napoleon may have always been a behavioral handful. Some kids fail because they don’t understand the material but, in my experience, most fail because behaviors prevent them from mastering that material. Fail is too neutral a word, too. True fact: One Napoleon I inherited remembered so little of his social studies from the year before, that he did not know who had won the Civil War.

I’m sorry if I’m painting a bleak picture and exceptions exist. I have taught a couple of them, although they represent a tiny minority of the retained students I have known. One that will stay with me forever was a boy who failed eighth grade at a time when failing students from the previous year were forced to repeat the first semester of eighth grade and were then allowed to start to high school. He was told he needed at least straight C grades to go on to high school. He got his Cs but the policy shifted under him. The administration decided not to promote students midyear. I remember his angry and frustrated quote: “I did my part. I got Cs. If they had told me to get B s, I would’ve got Bs!” He could have gotten those Bs too — if he had seen a reason to do so.

Eduhonesty: We recently received what appears to be the year’s retention policy. No one will be held back. Win or lose, pass or fail, students will be promoted. The emails on the topic referred to studies showing that promotion better benefits the promoted. I won’t disagree with the research, but I believe I disagree with the policy. I am going to lay out my reasons in a separate, following post because my reasons don’t address the failure research. That research probably accurately reflects the prospects for long-term success for the socially promoted. I want to explore another question.

Specifically, ignoring the advantages to the socially promoted, how does social promotion affect everybody else in our picture?

Can’t fault the efficiency

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Until the PARCC test, we had almost no morning announcements. We had no field trips. We showed only preapproved videos, whether those videos were educational or not. Professional development frequently addressed the need for no wasted minutes. While we did create a minimal number of fun incentives, enough to forestall a rebellion against the Empire, the agenda was clear: Test preparation at all times. The Librarian was not even allowed to announced Picture Day.

The first part of PARCC is over and we are giddy with field trip plans. At least three are in the works to my knowledge. Others have been suggested, some as behavioral and academic rewards that exclude groups of students, but others that are open to the general population. My colleagues look happy planning their trips. Announcements now include details of everyday school life. I expect we will finally begin to hear those details I remember from past years, like soccer victories and dance dress expectations.

Eduhonesty: I’m glad for what I regard as a return to normalcy. So are the kids. Kids like to be acknowledged when they win a game. I honestly have no clue what happened with our volleyball and basketball teams this year since I had no players in my classes. That’s kind of sad. Hooray for next week’s field trip to the museum!

Wednesday-Go-to-Meetin’-Day

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I got home at about 7 tonight. To be fair, I stopped to walk the mall for half an hour, then paused to buy half-price purses at Macys. I don’t want to whine, either. I had a fine day. My classes took notes, discussed sample bias, studied measures of central tendency and generally made progress while sometimes listening to music as I wandered the room, sitting beside individual students while I checked their work. In spaces between and after classes, I mostly attended meetings. They weren’t exciting meetings, but that’s fine. We should all be lucky enough to live in unexciting times. Boring meetings beat most the alternatives.

Since I am attempting to chronicle life in an academically underperforming school caught up in the wake of No Child Left Behind, though, I’ll list a few problematic aspects of my average Wednesday.

Total meeting time for the day: Two hours and fifteen minutes. Fortunately, we moved the 7th grade teachers’ meeting to the last half of the daily planning period. For more than half the year, the weekly 7th grade meeting started when our planning period started and ran until the Dean was done. Sometimes that meeting ran the whole or nearly whole 82 minute block. We have the 7th grade meeting down to a reasonable 45 minutes. No one wanted to complain about the longer meetings last semester. Our Dean is marvelous, a charming and dedicated woman who deserves all the help she can get. As hard as she works — I have often seen her in her office after 5:30 — no one ever felt like stopping the Dean when she was on one of her meeting rolls, even as 1/5 of the week’s planning time disappeared in sound bites on incentives and disciplinary measures. Still, we were grateful when a member of the seventh grade group realized we might be able to salvage some planning time by starting our meeting in the middle of the planning period. After school, we have the all-school meeting. This technically runs an hour and 10 minutes, but we finished a little early today and, joy of joys, the meeting never even touched on the evaluation system, otherwise known as the Charlotte Danielson Rubric. Instead, we discussed bilingual education. After that meeting, members of the English Language Learner’s team — that includes me — had our next meeting. The guy across the hall took notes while the rest of us discussed the plan for a new, expanded lesson plan. You can never have too many detailed, demanding new lesson plans to do!

I am not whining. I will observe that this is a weekly meeting schedule, amounting to over a full educational day in a month, and these are just the Wednesday meetings. Yesterday, I lost almost my whole planning block — over an hour — to a science subject matter meeting. The day before, I lost about the same amount of time to back-to-back math and science meetings, since I teach the two subjects. When today arrived, I was almost discombobulated when I realized that, due to the new late start, I actually had planning time available to me. I used the time to copy, clean and grade, a refreshing change from the usual day-to-day routine. Tallying up Monday through Wednesday meetings, I have spent around four and one-half hours in meetings during these three days. I have more meeting(s) tomorrow and I don’t know yet about Friday. Technically, we are supposed to be able to take Friday off, but practicably sometimes we need to plan more instruction. Those lesson plans suck up a lot of time and paper. Everything plan we make is supposed to include all the differentiation we are doing, and just about everything is supposed to be differentiated. Yesterday, we were discussing the upcoming activity where all students go out nightly for a month and record and draw the latest appearance of the moon. When we got to the obligatory differentiation stage, I wryly observed that maybe this once we could skip differentiation since I was pretty sure they could all draw pictures of the moon. We laughed. Then we set about filling in the differentiation squares. Lower students can get help from family members (In case they can’t find the moon?) and advanced students can compare Earth’s moon stages to the stages of Deimos and Phobos, the moons of Mars. Since upper students are never required to do extension activities, I’m pretty sure we won’t see much if any information on these two irregular, orbiting rocks that swing around Mars, but I’d love to be wrong. I am getting a bit tired of the same-o-same-o routines. Yesterday I joked to the guy across the hall: “I don’t look for meetings. They come looking for me.” This weird statement made us both laugh.

Again, the issue here is one of opportunity cost. I will spend around six hours in meetings during a given week, not including the time I spend conferencing about students and the bilingual curriculum with the guy across the hall. Those minutes add up quickly. If we multiply my six hours by the thirty-six weeks in a school year, total meeting time tallies up to 216 hours for the year. When I divide that 216 hour total by eight, as in an eight-hour day, I realize I will have spent 27 days in meetings by the end of this year. Ummm.. please excuse the profanity, but that’s pretty close to batshit crazy.

Many teachers will spend less. My meeting schedule is complicated by the fact that I teach two subjects and also ELLs (English Language Learners). Still, this just can’t be any way to run a cavalry charge or an educational improvement effort. What could I do with those 27 days? I could prepare new, fun, creative instruction. I could tutor confused students. I could review technical journals in my field, as opposed to the Charlotte Danielson — oh-help-me-not-again — Rubric. I’ll state for the record that the Rubric’s fine, it’s just that we hardly ever seem to talk about anything else in all-school meetings and professional developments. I could even take and finish an on-line class, adding to my understanding of special education, linguistic theory or homework research.

Eduhonesty: I used to create a one-page lesson plan for the week which laid out what I intended to teach on each day. Wednesday might be mean, median and mode review, for example. As time went on, I had a two page lesson plan that included the state standard I was addressing. If data and distributions were part of the seventh grade standards in Illinois, I would note that my lesson fell into that standard. I never minded adding the standards. As one likeable presenter at a PD said some years ago, “You can’t teach dinosaurs just because you like dinosaurs.” Obviously, teachers need a plan. Obviously teachers need to coordinate their plans. Sixth grade material should lead directly into grade seven material. But at this rate, my plan will be a weekly novella by the year 2025.

Here is one last observation on my impending retirement: If I have to write novels, I want aliens and spaceships in my pages. I want to describe barren landscapes on distant planets in faraway star systems. I’d like to hammer out a fictional plot that everyone could recognize as fiction, as opposed to an eight-page document which purports to be a blueprint for educational improvement but, in actual fact, serves as a sinkhole for time.

Jettisoning a standard

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At yesterday’s meeting, grade level teachers for science were planning instruction for the last quarter. We were using a set of common science standards. We’d like to do all of the standards in the picture below but, after discussion, we realized we can’t. We still have MAP testing, AIMSWEB testing, one more bout of PARCC testing and probably a few, random bubble tests used to collect math data, not including regular tests and quizzes.

the standards

In the end, we decided to discard Standard MS.ESS1-3. We simply must spend too much time testing to tackle this standard. It’s a good standard and understanding astronomical distances is likely to benefit students more than spending weeks of the remaining 42 days of the semester in testing. I don’t decide the schedule, though. I just help my groups decide what to drop while we attend our numerous meetings.

Time, time, time… see what’s become of us

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erased

I keep this calendar in my room, changing topics as the months go by. I have had months where the laminate on top was covered in words. If we want to understand why American students are falling behind much of the rest of the world, though, I think this month’s calendar provides a quick snapshot of part of the problem. The “Erased for PARCC” part resulted from a PARCC test requirement. We are not allowed to have any content words up in our room that might provide hints or clues to help answer PARCC questions. We had to remove or cover all wall decorations with any academic content.

IMG_0660[1]
All of the above content had to be covered or taken down.

PARCC did not eat up a full two whole weeks of instruction. Total time lost was technically three days, although taking three days off affects instruction before and after significantly. Since we used the last three days of the week for the test, we needed material of a short and uncomplicated nature before the test. I think we were adding up angles in triangles and seeking the value of random variables in math. Science was review, review, reviewing for future tests. The PARCC erasure contained a number of quizzes or tests. Teachers were also required to give a bubble test, an hour plus of mathematical misery, on the Monday after PARCC. Sad wails erupted through the room. “Another test?” WHY? We just got done!” Only they are never done.

Spring break did eat up a whole week of March. The fact that the quarter technically ended shortly before spring break also affected instruction since topics were determined, in part, based on whether or not we had time to finish them. More demanding topics were jettisoned because we did not have a long enough time block to do them justice.

Eduhonesty: March has been instruction light. Between the test and break, we will not get out of “seasons” this month. We are out of geometry. Ready or not, done or not, we have moved on to the agenda for the fourth quarter which is data and distributions. I would have liked to have spent more time on triangles; we never did get to the Pythagorean Theorem. Dammit.

Social science numbers applied to homework

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A March 23, 2015, article in the APA’s Journal of Educational Psychology® reported that more than 70 minutes of homework may be too much for adolescents. The article interprets another journal article* and I’m inclined to let the original researchers off the hook for some of the silliness that followed, since I have not read the bulk of their findings. According to the original article, though, adolescents benefit from doing homework alone and regularly with an hour a day being about the optimal amount of homework. The researchers came from the University of Oviedo in Spain and “looked at the performance of 7,725 public, state-subsidized and private school students in the principality of Asturias in northern Spain. The students had a mean age of 13.78. Girls made up 47.2 percent of the sample.”* The sample size certainly seems adequate, although I’d caution against automatically applying results from Spain to American school children.

If I study flight patterns of houseflies, I can’t assume that my results apply to dragonflies. For example, Spanish primary students commonly have a long midday siesta as part of their school experience, between noon and three. They then resume school after this rest, finishing around 5:00 in the afternoon. Secondary schools may also have a midday break. For young adolescents, the school day usually runs from 8 to 3, or 8:30 to 2 and then 3:40 to 5:30. Actual hours vary by region and by academic program. These hours themselves may affect homework performance, making a Spain/U.S. comparison less trustworthy. The Spanish educational system differs from ours in other important ways. Formal support for vocational and technical education in Spain is much stronger than the gutted system that American schools now possess.

In any case, these Spanish students received questionnaires asking how often they did homework and how much time they spent on different subjects. The questionnaires also asked if they did their homework alone. Scores on standardized math and science tests were used to determine academic success.

According to the article in the APA’s Journal of Educational Psychology®, providing a synopsis of the original Spanish research, researchers found the following:

… students spent on average between one and two hours a day doing homework in all subjects. Students whose teacher systematically assigned homework scored nearly 50 points higher on the standardized test. Students who did their math homework on their own scored 54 points higher than those who asked for frequent or constant help. The curves were similar in science.

“Our data indicate that it is not necessary to assign huge quantities of homework, but it is important that assignment is systematic and regular, with the aim of instilling work habits and promoting autonomous, self-regulated learning,” said Javier Suarez-Alvarez, graduate student, co-lead author with Ruben Fernandez-Alonso, PhD, and Professor Jose Muniz. “The data suggest that spending 60 minutes a day doing homework is a reasonable and effective time.”

The total amount of homework assigned by teachers was a little more than 70 minutes per day on average, the researchers found. While some teachers assigned 90-100 minutes of homework per day, the researchers found that the students’ math and science results began to decline at that point. And while they found a small gain in results between 70 and 90 minutes, “that small gain requires two hours more homework per week, which is a large time investment for such small gains,” said Suarez-Alvarez. “For that reason, assigning more than 70 minutes of homework per day does not seem very efficient.”

As for working autonomously or with help, the researchers found that students who needed help and did 70 minutes of homework per day could expect to score in the 50th percentile on their test while autonomous students spending the same amount of homework time could expect to score in the 70th percentile. One possible explanation of this result is that self-regulated learning is strongly connected to academic performance and success, according to Suarez-Alvarez.

“The conclusion is that when it comes to homework, how is more important than how much,” said Suarez-Alvarez. “Once individual effort and autonomous working is considered, the time spent becomes irrelevant.”

Eduhonesty: I am not attempting to contradict the Suarez-Alvarez research. I do wish to call attention to what has happened to what is likely a sound piece of research. I stumbled on this piece on Yahoo yesterday. The synopsis in the APA’s March 23, 2015, Journal of Educational Psychology® is titled, “How Much Math, Science Homework is Too Much?” with a subtitle that reads, “More than 70 minutes is too much for adolescents, researchers find.” At this point, if I google “more than 70 minutes may be too much for adolescents,” a phrase taken from the article, I get a frightening load of simplifications and gobbledygook from people who appear to have read this article’s headline, but not necessarily the content. Reddit says, “Study finds that more than 70 minutes of homework a day is too much for adolescents…” Healthfinder.gov used the same article to report that “Too Much Homework May Hurt Teens’ Test Scores,” adding, “Study found more than 90 minutes a night linked to lower performance in math, science.” Numerous bloggers have leapt on the study — or rather, on snippets of its results, taken out of context.

This is why I hate to rely on social science numbers. I suspect the original research behind these reports was well-designed. The conclusions drawn from it, however, are dubious at best. Ruben Fernandez-Alonso and Javier Suarez-Alvarez never said homework should be limited to 60 minutes a night, even though their study has been used to promote this view. They never said 70 minutes a day is too much for adolescents. They never said that too much homework may hurt teens’ test scores,” either. What they said was that adding more homework gave diminishing returns at a certain point; between 70 and 90 minutes scores still went up but not by enough to justify the extra time spent on homework. Above 90 minutes of homework, scores began to decline, but the researchers did not conclude that the homework load caused poor test scores. I’ll submit that one possibility for this decline might be that students who needed greatly more time to complete their homework struggled with academics generally. Harriet Crawford picked this article up for the Daily Mail in Great Britain. The Daily Mail titled their article, “Yes, too much homework really can be bad for children: Results begin to drop if it takes longer than 90 minutes with an hour being the perfect time,” and added the following subtitles: 1) A study found homework should take just 60 minutes for pupils to benefit, 2) More than 90 minutes and a student’s results actually begin to drop and 3) New research also discovered children should not receive help at home. Most emphatically, that last subtitle is probably not what Fernandez-Alonso and Suarez-Alvarez intended parents to conclude from their research. The study showed doing homework independently was associated with higher test scores. One possible reason for this result would be that students who are capable of doing their homework independently have achieved a level of mastery necessary to score well on tests. Students who require more help still may lack that mastery. Forcing students to try to do homework they can’t understand without helping them won’t help anyone, though, I’m certain.

I suggest readers plug in the words “more than 70 minutes may be too much for adolescents” into Yahoo or Google just to look at the results. It’s interesting to see how many news outlets seem to be carrying exactly or almost exactly the same articles under different bylines. There’s a regrettable amount of shoddy, duplicative journalism out there.

* “Adolescents’ Homework Performance in Mathematics and Science: Personal Factors and Teaching Practices,” by Ruben Fernandez-Alonso and Javier Suarez-Alvarez, University of Oviedo, and Jose Muniz, University of Oviedo and Biomedical Research Network in Mental Health, Barcelona, Spain; Journal of Educational Psychology; online March 16, 2015. The interpretation of the original article was published in APA’s Journal of Educational Psychology®.

A sad job loss that is probably good luck in disguise

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My colleague is one of the walking dead. (See the March 26th post.) Her zombie status has created much discussion among the living and the dead. She is a first year teacher and her score came in under the number the district had used to define proficient. Proficiency has been defined as 2.72 and above. My colleague received a 2.70.

These are social science numbers, the opinions of observers. In one professional development I attended, an auditorium of teachers was asked to determine Charlotte Danielson rubric numbers for teaching as they watched videos. I vividly remember one video that broke down with about 1/3 of the auditorium giving a “2” and 2/3 giving a “3” for the same video. A scattering of teachers bestowed a “4” on that video. These numbers are in the eye of the beholder. That missing 0.02 has zero statistical validity or reliability. But a first year teacher just lost her job based on that number. The Danielson group would never support using their numbers in this fashion; they will tell you that first year teachers naturally will have lower numbers. Teaching proficiency is learned on the job.

I worked with this teacher all year. She busily created new materials for her students. She adapted materials. She shared. She worked extremely hard.

Here is the saddest email I am likely to see all year, sent in the middle of spring break:

I know I should be relaxing, but of course I am thinking about work. I have 2 five hour long train rides this weekend, so I will have time to get something done…hopefully.

I know that you were starting the new vocabulary. I didn’t get to it last week, I was trying to get kids caught up on grades and such. If you know the vocabulary, send it to me? Please and thank you.

Also, what else are we covering? Possibly Monday we meet after our PLC? I just need to make sure I am prepared for an IEP meeting after school Monday.

Well I hope both of you are relaxing over break!!!!

My young colleague is more professional and forgiving than I am. I would give the administration that canned me over that nonsensical 0.02 about 0.02 minutes of my time over spring break. I don’t think I’d give them an adapted lesson plan, either, whether I adapted the materials (she will) or not. I trust my colleague to do her best for her students and I’ll be at those meetings she wants, helping her figure out what we are teaching next. I’ll also send her a recommendation and list of possible districts where she should put in applications. Our loss will be someone else’s gain.

In another world, first-year teachers get mentors. My colleague finally received that help more than halfway through the year, but that help came after the first of her two major evaluations. She received little help navigating the evaluation process regardless. My colleague made a mistake I have seen other young teachers make: She worked days, nights and week-ends to provide quality instruction for her kids while neglecting politics. Politics can take the best of teachers and administrators down.

Eduhonesty: That young woman worked so hard. She did a great job, too, which is why many district teachers are talking about this injustice. The guy across the hall was livid when we discussed the 0.02 fiasco. But I tried to calm those waters with an observation that I still believe: Losing this job may be one of the best things that will ever happen to my colleague. The job that our administrators were waving in front of her all year, amid threats about underperforming reflected in invented numbers — nobody in their right mind would want that job. With luck, she will be making much more money next year — in a much kinder and supportive environment.

Trying to sneak in under the radar

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Oops! Somebody may have noticed what has been happening. The following is from an email:

All,

Looking forward to quarter 4, I wanted to send a quick reminder that individual lesson plans should be submitted which reflect any modifications that are being made for students in your classes (SPED, ELL and/or GenEd). [That is, special education, English language learners or general education.]

Per the PLC Guide discussed at the beginning of the year: “If teachers in the PLC plan to teach content in a uniform manner, one lesson plan template can be turned in for multiple teachers. If varying strategies will be used from teacher to teacher, then each teacher must submit their own lesson plan template.” [No one has previously referred anyone to that Professional Learning Community guide for lesson plan advice. At the start of the year, we were told repeatedly we had better do what everybody else was doing because outsiders and administrators would be watching.]

Thank you in advance for all of your planning and preparation. Enjoy the rest of your break!

Signed by [A likeable academic coach who regularly pops into classrooms]

The absence of sensible differentiation has been a thread throughout posts for this year. That lack of differentiation has seemed indefensible to me. Apparently, somebody noticed that I was right. First, let me note that this is not a reminder. It’s closer to a change in policy or the recognition of an omission. Those “ifs” were never presented as options. We were told to teach the common lesson plan. But our overall lack of differentiation must have pinged on somebody’s radar. So now, we are allowed to differentiate provided we turn in our separate lesson plans. This represents a step in the right direction. It’s also an attempt to rewrite the past, though, so I am blogging it.

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