This is will be more anecdotal than my usual posts, but future predictions must sometimes be made from the tea leaves of daily life, rather than elaborate, data-filled spreadsheets.

A friend and I were driving together in her car this week, Hooray for vaccinations! The windows were open but we shared a car and ate lunch outside at the Chicago Botanic Gardens. Slowly, the world is returning to “normal.” Almost. On the way home, we had a sobering conversation. She was talking about a friend of hers who was angry about teacher vaccinations.

“Why should they be prioritized over other people?” The friend had asked in a hostile tone. “The data says teaching is safe.”

I’m not sure what data that is. Safe? Mortality rates are low, but not close to 0. The data does suggest teaching remains safer than many alternatives. According to the article, Covid: Teachers ‘not at higher risk’ of death than average – BBC News, the figures suggest teachers “do not have an elevated risk of the magnitude faced by health and care staff and by lower-paid manual and service workers.” Here are some numbers out of England:

“Among teachers, there were 18 deaths per 100,000 among men and 10 per 100,000 among women.” Secondary school teachers have a higher risk at 39 deaths per 100,000 people in men and 21 per 100,000 in women. For comparison, the article notes that per 100,000 men, 119 restaurant and catering staff died. Other dangerous professions today: 110 care workers, 101 taxi drivers and 79 nurses. Women do significantly better overall. For example, mortality rates per 100,000 women show death rates of 47 for care workers, 27 for sales or retail assistants, and 25 for nurses.

I want to focus on that ANGER today, though, rather than any stats. In those US states that have decided to prioritize teachers, teachers have been on the receiving end of outbursts of anger over their status in the vaccination line. That anger spills out in Twitter, Facebook, Nextdoor, and other social media sites. It crops up in conversations across the country. That anger is a much greater problem than any viewpoint that maybe the grocery clerks, restaurant workers and taxi drivers should go first.

We are all entitled to our personal plans for how we would have managed vaccinations. If my husband was a taxi driver, I’d naturally want him toward the front of the line. I don’t want to in any way slight the many nonteachers at elevated risk.

But teachers already feel dumped upon. They have been feeling dumped upon for years. Ever since No Child Left Behind, many have felt they were being held responsible for factors outside their control. When a teacher gets criticized and maybe even reprimanded because a student is sleeping in class — after a night spent fighting for rest in a crowded van and a rushed breakfast of a school granola bar and milk — it’s hard to describe that teacher’s likely feelings of helplessness and sometimes even rage. Blaming teachers for student behavior and student test results while ignoring the socioeconomic factors in the mix has been a fact of teaching life for too many years now. Unhappy, even miserable, teachers have come to believe the system is rigged to make their lives harder rather than easier.

Today’s miasma of anger has spilled out onto teachers– who are blamed for getting earlier vaccinations, for CDC protocols in schools, for forced online learning, for chosen online learning platforms, for limits on social opportunities at school, and for their reluctance to step into poorly ventilated rooms in schools that honestly cannot meet CDC guidelines. That anger has been popping out all over and shares one thing in common with the sleeping student mentioned above: Teachers cannot and do not control any of these factors. They didn’t come up with the guidelines, choose the platform, or decide never to fix their schools’ failing ventilation. They didn’t get to pick anybody’s vaccination schedules. But teachers are still feeling the anger directed against them.

And, oh, readers, are some of these men and women TIRED. I’ll use myself as an example. I can accept being blamed for my poor choices — they were my choices, after all, and if I do not own them, who will? — but I retired from teaching because I was TIRED of being blamed for factors outside my control. That girl who could not explain what we were doing in math class? Her English was testing at a first grade level and she was extremely shy to boot. When my tall and rather scary Assistant Principal decided to give ME hell for her “inability to explain the day’s lesson” to him, I only just managed to keep my silence for the sake of my students. I left my resignation letter in my glovebox and kept on teaching. I knew I was done, though. I was simply sick of being held responsible for test scores on a test pitched four or more years above the previously-tested learning levels of my students. Not to mention all the other problems I was expected to fix, like introversion, lack of background knowledge, and the effects of losing sleep because the whole group home had to pick up a new member in the middle of the night due to lack of staffing.

Some women and men are quitting today. This year has seen far more mid-year resignations than I can ever remember. Those resignations were once rare because they almost ensured a teacher would not be able to find another teaching position. They are not rare this year. Those teachers who decide to quit before year’s end are leaving the profession, so next year’s postings don’t matter to them.

Other teachers are planning to quit at the end of the year, despite the fact that schools are running on fumes right now because the subs have already quit. Yes, not all the subs are gone. Some future or newly minted teachers are still subbing to get their feet in the right doors. But those retired teachers? In big numbers, they ducked this year. The 2020-2021 sub crisis has been real, if eclipsed by other more immediate perils.

Eduhonesty: Readers, none of us can control COVID or the CDC. This last year has been extremely rough for everyone. Teachers nonetheless kept fixing the plane while flying it, and many of them have been doing heroic jobs while also caring for their own displaced kids.

I want to highlight just ONE big issue in this post:

Teachers are feeling blamed — yet again — for circumstances entirely outside of their control. That kind of blame gets old fast. When a person cannot fix a problem, but ends up being criticized and held accountable — well, Smart Move No, 1 may be going back to school to become an ultrasound technician. Or staying home with the kids if the $$ numbers work.

Every angry remark, every angry post, every disparagement of a working teacher becomes one more reason to walk away. The men and women in supportive districts who are in the middle of their careers are likely to wade through this latest set of troubles. Some teachers with a strong calling to teach will stay regardless of circumstances. Those teachers would keep preparing lessons in Aleppo, Syria, as the bombs fell. But especially teachers nearing retirement or just starting out may decide they are done. It’s not so hard to write off a mistake in direction in your twenties, not with decades still ahead to pursue alternative interests elsewhere. Sometimes three more years to a thirty-year retirement pension may not seem worth the risk or the money. Even with vaccinations, 2021 teaching remains insanely stressful in some locales.

I predict an ugly teacher shortage coming at us like chunks of a broken asteroid from space, one that will hit our low-achieving districts first and hardest. The reasons will be complex. No one simple factor will be responsible. Today’s ANGER may seriously feed that teaching exodus, though.

Articles are already being written:

“The coronavirus is vastly exacerbating that shortfall (of full-time, licensed teachers), experts say, by prompting many teachers to leave the profession or take early retirement.” (Pandemic Teacher Shortages Imperil In-Person Schooling – The New York Times (nytimes.com) and As Pandemic Upends Teaching, Fewer Students Want to Pursue It – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Readers, if you are not a teacher, please take time regularly to thank your children’s teachers if possible. No kids? Can you thank the teacher down the block? I’d also like to ask everyone to work to shut down those ugly comments on social media. Young people as well as teachers read those comments. How will they view the idea of teaching after they read those hurtful posts? To parents who don’t want their children to enter the teaching profession, I’d like to pose two questions: Who will teach the next generation? Who will teach our grandchildren? Teacher bashing has to stop.

Teachers didn’t cause this year. But this year may cause many to leave the classroom, and I don’t hold it against a single one of them who pulled that resignation letter out of the glovebox. Too much is too much, But this year’s “too much” has often been a series of tiny nicks and cuts, a slow bleed that did not have to happen.

We can do better. We can do more supportive and more understanding. We can do kinder.

A quote for spring, 2021:  “Always remember you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, smarter than you think and twice as beautiful as you’ve ever imagined.” – Dr. Seuss

Thanks to all my readers, Jocelyn Turner

Let’s acknowledge that “tests are often designed with racial, cultural, and socio-economic bias built in.” (How to Address Racial Bias in Standardized Testing | NGLC (nextgenlearning.org, Still Mostly White and Female: New Federal Data on the Teaching Profession (edweek.org) Naturally enough, white teachers may not flag problematic test questions. The cultural references in those tests are THEIR cultural references, resulting in questions make perfect sense to people living inside the bubble of whiteness.

But another, insidious and damaging institutional aspect of testing needs to be called out as racist. I hope I can lay this out clearly. I retired from a district that put the “wrong” in “wrong side of the achievement gap.” Our standardized test scores were so disastrous that the department of education for the state of Illinois fired our board and effectively took over the district. As I write this, I am reminded of a favorite quotation:

What are the demographics for my district? According to the Illinois Interactive Report Card site, which I highly recommend, my middle school is currently 61% Hispanic, 30% black, 5% two or more races, and 4% white. The school is 99% low income. Chronic absenteeism runs high. This is defined as “students who miss 10% percent or more of school days per year either with or without a valid excuse.” In 2018, that rate was 29%, and it rose to 38% in 2019. Chronic absenteeism fell to 18% in 2020, but I’m sure that number’s impacted by COVID.

I could throw in many more numbers but I would say those numbers for chronic absenteeism, in and of themselves, explain a great deal of the school’s poor scoring history on annual state standardized achievement tests. I don’t want to immerse readers in the many fascinating numbers that our poorest schools are posting. I want to share a big picture that I saw in my classroom.

Students of color fill the hallways of my school. Like almost all the other students in Illinois, they take the annual spring state achievement test. Schools across Illinois are all taking the same test. Different versions of this story happen in all fifty states. When we focus on the content of that test and the implicit bias in some of its questions, though, we miss the reason why I want parents to opt out this year. We miss the reason why testing as it currently executed should be SHUT DOWN.

Who are the children taking the most psychological damage from these tests? I’ll give readers one guess, and the answer is so not “the white kids.” Oh, individual white kids are undoubtedly getting hammered all over the country. But we have decades of evidence showing that children of color form a disproportionate number of those performing poorly on these tests.

These are the kids whose self-images are being defined by persistently low scores. These are the kids who end up disproportionately — and it’s all in the proportions — feeling like crap when the test results come back. Somehow, it seems as if our government and education leaders believe that children are oblivious to their own test results, despite the emphasis schools are now placing on those results.

(That emphasis was captured beautifully in a quote from a seventh-grade boy in my math class on a spring day when the tests had just ended: I pulled out the day’s work and he said, “More math? Why do we have to do more math? The tests are over.”)

As I click my way across the internet, I find articles with titles like “How to Address Racial Bias in Standardized Testing.” Here’s what I would like to make crystal clear today: YOU CAN’T DO IT. YOU CAN’T FIX THE BIAS. Even if you took some or almost all of those white-centric cultural biases out of the tests, the tests themselves — ANY STATE STANDARDIZED TEST — creates a bias in standardized testing that transcends the content of the test. Here’s one graph that explains what I just wrote:

Here’s another:

I invite readers to try various searches on test results by race. The search itself is interesting if you are mathematically inclined. What turns up is remarkably consistent. The Asian line is on top, followed by the white line, followed by the Hispanic line. Other subgroups end up criss-crossing the Hispanic line. The black line comes in at the bottom. That’s the results that our tests produce. You can find a few exceptions with Asian bilingual students on top in math but trailing whites in English, for example. But I remember where I first learned about this, at a professional development put together by a woman of mixed-race who was working to figure out how we might address the problems posed by these lines.

“The graphs always look like this,” she lamented.

Let’s ignore the cultural biases in the tests that might produce these results for the moment. Let’s just look at one fact: Kids are seeing these scores. In some cases, they are even having their noses rubbed in their scores by well-meaning administrators and teachers who hope to motivate them to do better.

Kids are forming their self-images based on these scores. I guarantee it. My last principal demanded teachers go over MAP benchmark test scores with all our students, showing them their score against the national average. The idea was to push them to try harder in school.

I’m at one of those moments where I put my hands in my lap and wonder if there is any point in going on. Sometimes I end up feeling trapped in a treacle of good-intentioned twaddle. It’s no coincidence I retired that year. Did those scores motivate my students? Maybe in a few higher-functioning cases. But my bilingual students were fairly far behind the English-language-learning pack. That’s why they had been placed in self-contained bilingual classes.

Mostly those scores sucked the life out of my students. Mostly those scores made them feel stupid. Even students who might have been labeled as gifted if they had spoken English before they arrived in this country at 14 years of age felt demoralized. Maybe those gifted students felt especially demoralized. They could see the chasm between their scores and the scores they were supposed to reach. They could immediately understand how far behind they were when compared to that so-called “average” child.

The same hopelessness was being experience by certain children in the special education classroom on the other side of the hallway. Lower-scoring children all across this country are hurting. Before we keep testing the bejeezus out of all our students — I think our leaders need to ask themselves: Who are the children who are performing poorly on these tests and how does this performance affect their view of themselves.

“I’m just dumb, Ms. Turner,” students have told me when asked why a quiz or some other activity did not go well. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that. I didn’t tell them that. I hope no one ever told them that. No, my students drew that conclusion for themselves, and I strongly believe that those annual test scores are a big factor in convincing many children that they are “dumb.”

It’s not a surprising conclusion to draw if your state test scores put you in the bottom quartile of all state test results. BUT THAT BOTTOM QUARTILE CONTAINS 25% OF AMERICA’S CHILDREN — millions and millions of our children. We have elevated the importance of standardized test scores into the stratosphere over the last few decades. Do we think the kids were not paying attention as we added those assemblies about the importance of taking the test seriously? Do we think kids are not always trying to figure out where they stand in respect to their peers?

Eduhonesty: Oh, please, please, please. I feel betrayed by the Biden administration right now. I understand the desire to measure to get data. But do you want to know why rates of anxiety and ADHD have shot up in schools across the nation, reader? I feel certain at least part of that change stems directly from the pressure adults are putting on children to do well on these tests.

Children are not oblivious to today’s testing mania. Children try hard to please, at least initially. We are cracking eggs to make our test score omelette, and those eggs are children.

Make no mistake, the graphs above lay out a particularly pernicious truth that is part of what I have written here: Current testing has become a disaster for many kids ESPECIALLY KIDS OF COLOR. You just have to look at the above graphs to realize that proportionally more harm — sometimes much more harm — is falling on kids of color. The kids toward the bottom of our score graphs are taking more and harder hits over time.

You want to see racism in action? Standardized tests are a perfect place to look — and not merely because of the content of questions. Those tests are shaping the personal image and worldview of our students. Visualize those tests as a running race. When nine out of ten kids come in ahead of you at the finish line, even though you tried your hardest, how do you feel? If this happens year after year, will you keep racing? Honestly, what will happen to the kids who always straggle in late or last?

One more thought: I wonder if we would so casually ignore the pain we are causing to children and young adults across the country if those children were mostly all white? I don’t think so. RACISM is about the only explanation I can find for that lack of concern for the psyches of the children in this testing experiment. That racism may not be overt or intentional, but nonetheless I believe it’s there.

If we want to fix the achievement gap, we have to shut down toxic testing. That gap cannot be fixed unless kids believe in themselves, unless kids can see themselves winning that running race. State standardized tests work directly against that self-confidence.

At the moment, we are producing a generation of kids who are more likely to say, “I just can’t run, Ms. Turner,” instead of “I will try harder next time.”

_______________________________________________________________________

Phone number for the US Department of Education: 1 (800) 872-5327

On Twitter? Secretary Miguel Cardona@SecCardona

Thanks to all my readers, Jocelyn Turner

Here are the numbers from a previous post that made me silently curse as I pasted them into what I had written:

Percent of workers with the ability to work from home by income percentile

Repeat: Only about 1 in 5 workers in the bottom half of U.S. wage earners can be expected to be able to work at home.

What does that mean if you are a teacher? It means the mom or dad who could sit your 4th grade student down at the computer, help that kid get started and provide support throughout the day — that mom or dad is most likely to be lumped into the top quarter of income earners in the U.S. Those lower wage earners can’t sit home all day helping their kids. They can’t afford expensive sitters either.

This is one MAJOR REASON why sustained online and hybrid learning can be expected to widen the achievement gap.

Yet in many places, teachers are still being evaluated on student performance. If the Biden Administration continues on its current course, standardized test performance will be part of some evaluation packages. Is that fair? Does that even make sense?

Eduhonesty: These standardized tests are hammering kids’ psyches hard. I’ll write more about that in the near future. For now, let’s look at the tests’ impact on teachers.

Are you a teacher, reader? If so, far and away your best strategic move employment-wise may be to take a position in a district where parents are positioned at the top of the income distribution — because poverty has the potential to be a tremendous loser for you come evaluation time. Wealthy districts overall post higher — often much higher — test scores. In 2020 and 2021, the ability to hire the right sitter or work at home has often been crucial to learning. Parental support always mattered, but never as much as now. If kids are not logging on or staying at the computer, they are not learning.

I absolutely don’t want to imply that parents at the bottom of the income charts are not supportive. But parents who must be at work to pay the rent cannot also be sitting beside their children during online math. Clones and robots who could fill in for parents are still a few decades away, and the wealthy will own them first regardless. I know heroic sacrifices are being made right now, too, by families who are managing to have that one parent at home while cancelling services and cutting back or eliminating every discretionary purchase possible. Women especially are torpedoing their careers to be at home.

But evaluation systems now often effectively hold teachers responsible for the resources and socioeconomic conditions of their students. Why do so many teachers dread those upcoming state standardized tests? Those tests have been used as weapons against teachers for years. Low test scores can and have resulted in lower evaluations and even loss of merit pay. In some cases, teachers have been terminated for those scores. In Rhode Island, a whole district was terminated for those scores.

In February of 2010, School Superintendent Frances Gallo and the school committee in Central Falls, Rhode Island’s smallest and poorest city, voted to fire every educator at Central Falls High School at the end of the school year. The committee did this because they were failing under NCLB, with only around half of the school’s students graduating, and only 7 percent of 11th-graders proficient in math in 2009. At a committee meeting, 93 names were called out aloud for firing — 74 classroom teachers and reading specialists, guidance counselors, physical education teachers, the school psychologist, as well as the principal and all three assistant principals, according to the Providence Journal.

I understand some of the teachers at the city’s only high school cried, but the Superintendent and committee held their ground. Then-President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan applauded the move. Arne Duncan said that this move was an example of “doing the right thing for kids.”

The word “scapegoating” comes to mind and I remain aghast at this piece of ugly politicking. I remember thinking; if we are going to sacrifice teachers en masse, without regard for their actual job performance, why fire only the high school? These students undoubtedly entered high school years behind targets. Their high school math scores make that clear. Why not fire the whole damn elementary and middle school staff? Why not fire them all?

This grand gesture sickened me. I am sure Central Falls had some substandard teachers. There’s no district of any size that doesn’t have a few turkeys. But I am also sure there were some stellar teachers in that group, teachers who regularly worked 70 plus hours a week as many of our best teachers do regularly. Especially in our most challenged school districts, hopelessly optimistic do-gooders sometimes dedicate almost all of their waking hours to helping their students.

Arne Duncan actually called those Central Falls school officials courageous. They sound vindictive and foolish to me. In the end those teachers were rehired, although I’m sure a few had moved on and were replaced by inexperienced teachers. What was the result of that grandstanding? Not a lot. Currently on Schooldigger.com, the school is 55th out of 59 high schools. See https://www.schooldigger.com/go/RI/schools/0012000026/school.aspx for more straight lines across sad graphs that indicate no significant improvement.

The point I’d like to make here is this: At the end of the day, it’s almost never the teachers. It never was the teachers. We are blaming teachers for a host of results, many of which are not in their control. More and more, I talk to teachers and they tell me they think they can’t win. No matter what or how much they do, they expect to be criticized for not doing enough. The scary part is that when I look at events like that Rhode Island purge, I think they may be right.

Looking for improvement over the course of a year is perfectly rational. Teachers should be able to demonstrate their students are gaining at least a year’s knowledge overall in the course of a year, with the understanding that slow learners, bilingual students and others may not be able to hit that target for perfectly valid reasons. But I’m betting those high school teachers found themselves in a situation similar to the one I found myself in the year before I threw up my hands and retired.

Teachers cannot magically transport students up across multiple years of unknown content with a wave of a magic wand. If we could teach 4 or more years of the mathematical curriculum in one year, despite the absurd amounts of time lost to testing, we would not be in this mess. That kid who entered tenth grade doing math at a fourth grade level cannot be expected to catch up to the curriculum underpinning that standardized test — not without massive amounts of tutoring — tutoring poor districts cannot afford even if the extra time, staff and busses required could somehow be found. The very idea that classrooms should be expected to make this leap represents a triumph of faith over science and reason.

When our students have fallen far behind for reasons partially or entirely outside a teacher’s control, such as frequent moves, lack of family support, lack of English-language skills, dyslexia or other impediments to reading, homelessness, frequent hospitalizations, various special education indicators, such as severe ADHD, and a host of other factors that undercut our children’s educations — what happens to teachers when we blame the teachers for those children’s poor standardized test performances?

Because that was exactly what happened in Rhode Island. What was wrong with those teachers in Central Falls, Rhode Island? I’d like to suggest that in many cases nothing was wrong, other than the fact that they had been foolish enough to try to teach in a disadvantaged school district in a time of witch hunts.

In the sixteenth century, we identified witches using signs such as cat ownership, the ability to float in water, big moles or birthmarks, or moldy butter or milk in the house. In the twenty-first century, we identify “substandard teachers” by looking at their students’ test scores. Using those test scores for that purpose is probably every bit as scientifically valid as burning women who own cats.

It’s tantamount to tying a teacher’s hands to her feet and throwing her in the water to see if she will float. And, oh damn, are a lot of teachers drowning! The drowned are taking real estate courses, working social media to find an alternate career, or just attending therapy sessions while they try to find a medication to staunch their anxiety. Their luckier counterparts are enjoying early retirement while doing watercolors and baking bread.

Reader, ask yourself: How do you think those fired teachers in Central Falls slept after the mass firing? Officials read those teachers’ names aloud to a crowd in a mass firing presumably intended to shame them all. Imagine being one of the teachers in that national story. Suddenly, after giving decades of your life to children, bureaucrats pull your job — maybe the only job you know how to do — right out from under you, pointing fingers of blame directly at you despite the fact that you have been fighting your hardest against forces as strong as poverty, hunger and homelessness.

Teachers were left to wonder how they would pay their mortgages. What would they do next? How do you think those teachers are sleeping now, rehired or not? PTSD anyone? When you dedicate your whole life to helping kids, not the easy kids who live in the land of student lounges with flat-screen TVs and amply endowed college funds, but the kids who are locked in a long, uphill struggle that may have included ten new school districts by fifth grade, what do those standardized test-based teacher evaluations do?

Eduhonesty: Administrators would tell readers they try to take into account student differences in teacher evaluations. We may be living the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party out here, yet we still have many competent principals and superintendents. The best administrators are informed by data, but not driven to hasty conclusions based on numbers that don’t mean what they are supposed to mean.

But those state test score numbers were used to justify the firings in Central Falls. They have been used to hammer many teachers, schools and districts, both formally and informally over the last decade. Certain educational and government leaders have become enamored of data-driven instruction, and I support data-driven instruction: HOWEVER, DATA-DRIVEN DECISIONS ONLY SERVE THE GREATER GOOD WHEN PEOPLE GENUINELY UNDERSTAND THE DATA!

Let me throw in a personal example: I have had two new principals tell me directly they needed to pull up their school’s standardized test scores to keep their jobs. Both lasted two years, I believe. One may have made three. I moved on before she was done. One problem with the administrative revolving door is that principals don’t know their teachers. But those new principals do know that they must make sure no one perceives them as “soft” on teachers who are not making those scores go up, I called my last principal “The Gunslinger from Texas.” She took my welfare to heart toward the end of the year but, oh my God, was she scary when she started. She came out blasting in all directions. And it was all about pushing test score numbers up,

By October, I had a resignation letter waiting in the glovebox of my car. I managed to hold on until year’s end for the kids’ sakes and extra retirement benefits, but it was close some days. I was fed up.

As I read this, I am afraid that if government and educational leaders were confronted with what I just wrote, they would come up with a national program to teach statistics to bureaucrats rather than doing the right thing:

P. S. Non-teacher reader, I have one idea I furiously want to get over the plate: When I am teaching seventh grade and I get a student who enters my class reading at a second-grade level and doing math a third-grade level, I should not be held responsible for her annual state test scores. That test has been designed to match a curriculum that has zero to do with what that girl knows and everything to do with a government agenda that completely ignores many decades of research into child development. Even if I advance that girl multiple years academically, those advances may not be visible in the annual standardized test. The material in the test is simply too far above where she is operating. She can’t read the test, dammit. and if that’s a big problem for me, well, it’s a much bigger problem for her. She’s the one telling me, “I’m just dumb,” while I try to motivate her and do damage control.

P. S.S. The worst part of all this is I am sure some people understand using test scores as a measure of teacher quality has long been USELESS and a no-win scenario for teachers in socioeconomically depressed areas. They know. I can only assume they don’t care.

Wishing all my readers a great week! J. S. L. Turner

“On 24 February 1989, part of the right-side fuselage of United Airlines Flight 811 rips off, ejecting nine people from the aircraft and causing explosive decompression. The flight later lands safely at Honolulu without any more loss of life. It was later determined that an electrical short circuit caused the cargo door to open.” (List of Mayday episodes – Wikipedia)

Yes, this is eduhonesty, the education blog. I started with the plot summary from episode 1 of a solid, documentary series called “Mayday” because of my opening thought:

For the last year, across America, teachers have been fixing the plane while flying it. That’s no easy feat and teachers have not received nearly enough credit for their work. Many of those remote learning classes came together fast. Others came together more slowly as districts fought to obtain broadband and hardware for their students. The long nights, new software, changed plans, and parent phone calls have been steady features of daily life for groups of US teachers, many of whom have been exchanging tips and recommendations with their own children’s teachers as everyone tries to keep students and families in the learning game.

Not all those phone calls have been friendly. Our COVID flight’s been bumpy the whole way and some frazzled parents want to take their rough ride out on the teacher. They probably want to take it out on the water meter reader. Or any handy body that they can use to vent their disappointment, confusion and, yes, even rage.

Moms and dads — mostly moms — who had to give up their jobs to manage in-home learning have every reason to be angry. The best of bad options is still a bad option. Luckier counterparts who have been able to work from home retained their income, but their struggle has been real, and often daunting. In the “old” days, those dads and moms had breaks, occasional minutes for no one but themselves. Now they are on an unexpected, wild ride where the only privacy may be in the bathroom.

The years 2020 and 2021 have proven to be the equivalent of that United Airlines flight to Hawaii. Not all our students will walk away from this mess with their educations intact. Already, teachers and other members of the educational community are asking urgently: How will we catch them up? Especially those kids who hardly ever bothered to log in this year may never catch up. The kid who would not do the last year’s instruction may choose not to do the remedial instruction either. What then?

Eduhonesty: I will go back to my efforts to limit standardized testing shortly, but I thought I’d share today’s thoughts.

Sometimes, keeping the plane aloft is all we can manage. It’s not 2019. Those comforting rituals and routines from the past come to us now only as echoes from an easier time. We live in a time of masks, hand sanitizer, and Xs and Os positioned six feet apart in lines across the ground. Friends are endlessly refreshing computers, trying to find vaccinations. It’s so easy to dwell on the negative.

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the positive. The plague landed on our shores and we did not fold. Some areas have done better than other areas in terms of connectivity and getting devices into student hands, but I believe even this fact has an upside: The disparity in tech and tech access has been slowing down students in poor districts for years. As poor schools got devices into students’ hands and put them on that steep learning curve to begin remote learning, we taught tech skills our students needed. I can’t prove this yet, but I’m sure that the technological learning gap between poor and wealthier schools has narrowed considerably. Remote learning has also exposed the fact that a subsection of our students learn better online; those children may benefit as parents explore online options.

The intense concern for children who lost learning during 2020 and 2021 should also result in a much-needed focus on tutoring. America’s poor districts historically have never been able to scrounge up the funds for the extensive tutoring some students required. Year after year, schools have passed on students who were not ready for their next year’s curriculum, with lack of remediation/tutoring forming a big part of this picture.

I vividly remember one year when my district found enough money for summer school but not enough for summer school busses. Students could go if they wanted to go and could somehow get themselves to school. They did not have to attend, no matter how badly they had done during the school year. “My mom has to work in the morning,” was excuse enough to avoid any summer instruction.

With the spotlight on COVID learning loss, I am hoping legislatures will step up to provide the funding required to pay for the staff — and food, air-conditioning and busses — to make extra tutoring happen in disadvantaged communities. The chance to establish a robust plan for student remediation has never been better.

This post is a thank-you to all the teachers who kept this plane flying while sometimes crying into their beer or coffee. No one could have done it without you, especially in this time of almost-no-subs. YOU made it happen. YOU made it work.

Many virtual hugs to all the teachers out there who just kept fixing that plane, and who are fixing that plane still.

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Here is a link for readers: NYC’s Success Academy staying remote for rest of school year – New York Daily News (nydailynews.com) that comes down in favor of not opening schools this year. I’ve emphasized the fact that we have been shamefully unhelpful about vaccinating teachers, with about half of the United States not prioritizing their vaccinations. I’ve emphasized the impact of illness, the fact that not all adults working in schools will survive re-openings, and that some will end up as long haulers, sick for months or longer. Please look up the long hauler posts.

But let’s forget sick. Let’s forget ventilation, transportation, and scampering students who don’t grasp the CDC protocols. Let’s just look at one practical concern, commonly called “transitions.”

A couple of years ago, a well-paying district offered me a maternity position for a bilingual kindergarten class. I would have spent the fall with a group of new students. The interviewer sunk herself with a few lines:

“You would not spend much time teaching content. When they begin school, it’s all about teaching routines so they know how to be students.”

I had taught middle school and high school students in low-income areas where gang involvement was problematic and prevalent. Not much scared me. However, the idea of a large group of five-year-olds, one or more of whom might cry long and hard each morning because they missed mommy (I had subbed longer-term in a pre-K classroom by then), a group still prone to occasional bathroom accidents… That idea felt intimidating. The crying and diapers I could handle. What stopped me from taking the job was that I recognized how vital it was to hammer home those routines. I did not want that responsibility.

Routines have always been one of my weak points. I’m ADHD and I don’t like routines. I struggle not to break down my own routines. Probably the biggest lesson I had to learn in my first few years of teaching was that my students required the structure of regular procedures, a schedule that could be turned into regular habits. They needed me to define what was expected, and then to keep those expectations in place. The time loss from doing Tuesday differently was likely to be too great to justify impulsive changes just because I wanted to try something new and fun.

It’s all about transitions. It’s always about transitions. Transitions should be smooth, the behaviors that go into them automatic. Well-engineered transitions prevent time loss, which prevents learning loss. It’s about going from Point A to Point B as efficiently as possible. In an ideal world, our students walk into the classroom and get directly to work because they know what to do. They take their writing journal out when they sit down. They log into their software and go straight to the opening activity that is always waiting for them. If they are in pre-K, they wash their hands, identify their name tag, and trace the first letter of their name, which they can decorate if they have time.

One huge problem with opening/closing/opening/closing, remote/in-person/remote/in-person schooling lies in those routines and the resulting transitions. The routines for in-person schooling are only vaguely similar to those for remote learning. When students go back into the building, daily routines must be taught. After a quarantine hiatus, they must be taught again, probably with changes designed to stop another quarantine.

The in-out, now-we-do-this-instead-of-that character of remote/in-person teaching will be trouble. When kids are not certain what comes next, they often turn to a friend to talk or simply sit waiting for instructions. They may go to the kitchen to see if they can get another cherry Pop-Tart.

People who have never taught may not sense how much work goes into getting the train moving and keeping the train on track. I recommend the following short read: How Long Does It Really Take to Form a Habit? 7 Things to Consider (healthline.com) which says “according to a 2009 study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, it takes 18 to 254 days for a person to form a new habit.” Habits are far from automatic and, for me anyway, easily short-circuited.

Without going off on this tangent, I will observe that I may only need a few days to be able to get my class of middle school students to pull out their journals when the bell rings. Other teachers taught a version of this opening activity in earlier years, so I have a past habit to build on. But if I keep changing those journal expectations, that habit will wither away, at least where my class is concerned. Once students know what to do, upending the day’s process costs valuable minutes. The cost to student peace of mind should not be ignored either. Most kids strongly prefer to know what to expect during their school day. Having a routine makes them feel safe.

Once we get our kids into a working routine, in many cases, we ought to leave them there.

Eduhonesty: Having written this, I see situations where the school doors must be flung open even if they only close again. If large numbers of students are refusing to log-in, for example, then those open-close-open-close schools may still be our best option. Students who cannot manage remote learning well, such as our lowest readers, may also require live instruction in physical classrooms.

Still… I get tired of saying this, but I’ll try again: Why don’t we ask the teachers? Why don’t we ask our teachers how online 2021 is going? Because many educators think that what they are doing is working. They believe that upending the applecart in March will do more harm than good. America’s teachers have their boots on the ground. They can see what is happening as they grade student work. They know if what they are doing has been successful.

Being hell-bent on opening schools does not take into account many factors, like those habits and transitions I just described. Yes, we desperately desire a return to “normal.” But we can’t will normal to happen. We can’t force normal. NCLB, the Common Core, RtI, Race to the Top and other mandates ought to have taught us by now: Brute force seldom improves education.

When we don’t take time to listen to teachers, though, brute force in the form of poorly-thought-out mandates can confuse America’s students quickly, and sometimes irretrievably,

P.S. I strongly suspect that one reason educational and governmental leaders are working to get those student bodies into school is because they want to be able to force students to take this year’s spring standardized tests. Those tests are detrimental to learning in many ways. See A Seldom Discussed Problem with the Common Core, the Standards Movement and Testing | Notes from the Educational Trenches (eduhonesty.com).

Too often today, our lower readers are not getting their needs met. With tests dictating curriculum and curriculum dictating tests, students who need material from earlier years may never see it. A seventh-grade student reading at a fourth grade level will potentially spend the whole year staring at nothing but fundamentally unreadable materials — materials that student is forced to slowly decipher while other, better readers sail comfortably on ahead. Schools struggling to hit targets often don’t provide fourth-grade books for fourth grade readers because those books don’t address the content of the annual test. A book that seems unlikely to improve annual test scores has become a book destined to be stuffed in a box in a dark closet, hidden in one of those hidey-holes where past materials are stashed because they are too valuable to throw away, but too far off the test/curriculum to be used by schools scrounging for test points.

One irony that hardly ever enters our discussions: We sometimes have what our students need, even in the poorest of districts. We sometimes possess books that our lower readers could actively enjoy. Maybe they are hidden on the shelves behind the theater stage that is never used, not since drama was cancelled because drama was not providing enough testing bang for our buck. We may have software that meets the needs of our lower readers too, but, like those boxed books, simpler material that does not match an aggressively test-based curriculum is left behind as we open up much tougher units expected to match the year’s test.

Eduhonesty: Here’s what the Biden Administration and so many others have missed in the recent past. Those tests are not merely measuring instruments. The desire to measure our students’ learning makes perfect sense.

But the very learning those tests purport to measure now suffers directly because of the tests. My students did not merely lose learning because of the opportunity costs of testing — the fact that I could not teach them for days while I tested them. My students lost learning because they were lower-level readers who were never ALLOWED to use books they could actually read. Those books were too far below the level of the state test. Those books stayed in the closet while I desperately tried to get traction with the required books and software the district had purchased to match the 7th grade Common Core curriculum.

Books and software are expensive. Those newly bought books won’t disappear any time soon. Administrators have to justify their purchase. The better books may stay in their dark subbasement corners for years.

Spring standardized tests are not merely sucking up our most precious resource– TIME — but they are ensuring our lower-performing students receive subpar instruction during the rest of the year. Because my students never read those Common Core-based books; they deciphered them with my help, a group of scholars buried in a tomb of unknown symbol combinations.

I can’t blame administrators whose jobs are on the line for desperately trying to match instruction to future state test questions. Still, I wish more people inside and outside of education understood the consequences of that approach. How are kids supposed to learn if we teach to a test that is too far outside their understanding? What happens to that kid who is doing math at a fifth grade level when he is hit with nothing but daily work, quizzes and tests set at an eighth grade level? We waste unconscionable amounts of student time with this test-focused approach and, until we get a grip on testing, will continue to do so.

Teachers know this. I was so sad as I looked at some of those books behind the useless stage and down in the moldy subbasement. I wanted those books. I knew some of my students would love some of those books. But instructional coaches and others had already pretty much laid out my lessons for the year. There was no room left in the schedule for boxed books did not match the Common Core or that PARCC test that came before the IAR test.

No new (old) books for me! No readable new (old) books for my students! No help anywhere, even when my administrators agreed with my views. No one was willing to take a chance on a test-score decline, even when the rigid, test-focused approach we were taking was likely to CAUSE that decline.

It’s been the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party out here for awhile.

Will any of my former students become readers someday? With a few exceptions, I doubt it. We sure never made reading any fun.

What the Biden administration and so many others miss: These tests have ceased to be mere measuring instruments. They now drive instruction. But in districts that historically have not done well on these tests, they are often driving that instruction right over a cliff.

Now is a perfect time for the change. Let’s just stop. Let’s opt out of state testing on a national basis and shift to benchmark testing to track student progress. We can use NAEP testing to track state progress over time. If legislatures will not rein in those tests, parents should step up and keep their children home on test days. Why not bake a seven-layer cake while wearing pajamas and then binge watch a new family favorite? I suggest we create happy memories instead of forcing our children to run one more punishing, academic gauntlet.

Currently, in some districts, schools are ending up with 29 weeks or fewer of available instructional time after testing, test practice, and test preparation. That’s completely bonkers.

Let’s just stop. Because, as it stands, bit by bit, piece by piece, we are chewing up some kids — and to what end? We keep re-documenting “facts” we have already determined, facts we have known forever. In rare instances, when schools post surprises, those results often come back late or even past the end of the school year. Our happy or sad surprises tend to simply disappear in the deluge of data, never to inform instructional decisions.

Political and educational leaders keep trying to do an end run around what they know to be true: School funding should be reformed so ALL students can be given the supports they require to learn — not just those lucky kids whose parents can afford to live in moneyed zip codes.

P.S. This blog is about to make a shift in direction. I no longer believe that we can trust politicians to rein in the test monster. Even the Biden administration did not provide a respite from testing. Parents may be our last, best hope, Opting Out, family by family, may be the only way to get the message across: it’s time to stop sacrificing children to numbers we hardly ever even use.

A post about putting teeth into time management:

As you lay in bed, if you find yourself saying, “Now I have the hand-outs and the extra chalk. I finished that Google Doc and I sent the spreadsheet to Maria. I have set up tomorrow’s online activity on volcanoes and I think Renata’s mom has figured out how to find the links…” Etc. STOP!

Try online guided meditations. Visualize a favorite ocean beach. Read a book. I find books written in Spanish or French to be especially effective. I enjoy myself but the mental effort puts me to sleep fairly quickly. If necessary, to break the mood, get out of bed and make yourself some cocoa or tea.

It’s 2021, and the cost of being zonked has potentially increased by an order of magnitude, especially for the unvaccinated who are in classrooms. Feeling exhausted right now is not a good plan. Ducking haphazard attacks by a new microbe requires alertness. You need to be aware of masks, distances, hand sanitizer and trickier tells, such as flushed faces in quiet bodies.

If you are not done preparing the dinosaur WebQuest or preparing the latest spreadsheet for Dr. X, put the world down anyway. Simply put it down. Be done. Watch Netflix and defog your brain. Bake a cake with the kids. Watch the basketball game with your spouse in peace. Paint a watercolor pterodactyl. Whatever. As long as what you are doing refreshes you.

Too many teachers are living too zonked as we try to do it all. We have gotten used to hitting difficult and even irrational targets. We adapt, adapt, adapt.

“What?! I need to prepare 18 spreadsheets covering the last three years’ tests by Friday?! Dammit. I guess I’ll have to skip lunch. I can pick up Chinese for dinner on the way home.”

Then we fill the DVR with all the programs we can’t watch and start working.

Eduhonesty: Readers, for many of you, if you keep going until you are done, you will never rest — because you will never be done. Your family relationships will be strained, along with your own mental health. If you have thirty hours of work to do in your eighteen waking hours, IT’S TIME TO TRIAGE. Dump the less important items first, but don’t feel compelled to stop there. At the end of the day, you should only have to skip those movies, cakes, and basketball games for emergencies.

And your whole life should not be an emergency.

This post comes from the far side of the moon where I lived during my last year of teaching before retirement. I made a few mistakes that year. One was cutting sleep. Another was trying to fulfill a plethora of irrational demands. Can’t do it all?

Again: Set a deliberate stopping point. Otherwise it’s too easy to fall into that trap where we decide to do just one more thing, because there’s always one more thing — and then another and another and another.

P.S. Yes, sometimes genuine emergencies do arise. That comes with teaching, especially in these times. But somethings wrong when all these emergencies begin to seem normal.

The groan you hear is the creaking doors of a widening achievement gap. Districts have played tech catch-up since the ’90s. While District A ‘s been 1:1 for years, District B sent kids to the “computer lab” a few times a week. District B lost the online game before it began.

Let’s just own this thing for a change. Property-tax based school funding is inherently discriminatory. I live in a district that once asked its PTO to stop raising money because they did not know what to do with what they had. My girls had flat screen TVs to watch in their high school lounge. My students didn’t even have a lounge.

Eduhonesty: I understand why Chicago is frantic to open school doors. Friends who work in Chicago complain about students who simply are not bothering to log in. Other students are logging in but not participating. You can prepare the most brilliant lesson ever designed, but it doesn’t matter if Brent and Ginger don’t log in, or if they wander away to get a snack in the middle of that lesson,

It’s been clear for a long time that a greater percentage of kids in traditionally college-bound districts are logging in. More of them overall are completing homework. The achievement gap will continue to widen as this occurs.

THIS IS WHY ALL AREAS SHOULD FOLLOW PRESIDENT BIDEN’S LEAD. VACCINATE THE TEACHERS. Biden says teachers should move up in priority to receive Covid-19 vaccine – CNN Do we want those schools open? VACCINATE THE TEACHERS.

I have worked in those old schools. I don’t believe that all of them can be properly ventilated. I don’t trust kids to follow all the rules about distancing and masks. (Anyone who does probably never had kids.) I know how crowded halls and cafeterias are. If we put everybody back in the same school that was overcrowded for the last decade, that school will still be overcrowded.

Those teachers across the country who are fighting openings? Why don’t we try listening to them for a change? Based on what they have heard and read, many teachers are uncomfortable going into the classrooms they know. They have seen what the hallways of their schools look like. They have a pretty good idea of what to expect if schools open. Dismissing teachers’ rational concerns is likely to become one more nail in the coffin as some of America’s teachers weigh whether or not to continue teaching in the future.

Merriam Webster’s definition of first responders: a person who is among those responsible for going immediately to the scene of an accident or emergency to provide assistance. Teachers are their own version of first responders. I guarantee readers an academic emergency has been underway since last spring.

Let’s rescue the best and sometimes only people in position to step in and mitigate our learning losses. While we dig our way out of the learning hole that COVID has dug through the heart of our neighborhoods, let’s support teachers. Reader, are you in a state that has not bumped teachers into the current vaccination pool? When you have a free moment, please contact your legislative leaders to let them know you support vaccinating teachers now.

In practical terms, those shots may shut down most or all of today’s fights about opening schools.

A last observation: Please see my previous post, though, for a take on why not all children should be obliged to walk through those school doors. Privilege and School Re-openings | Notes from the Educational Trenches (eduhonesty.com)

One takeaway from a webinar yesterday on COVID-19’s effects on education: This epidemic’s face shifts from community to community. In some neighborhoods, families may not favor live instruction even though their school boards, mayors and governors are pushing hard for that instruction. COVID-19 looks scarier in poor neighborhoods, disproportionately neighborhoods of color. That’s because the illness and death rates in those areas are running higher, sometimes much higher, than state averages.

My thought: At least some mandated openings smack of presumptuousness and privilege. We are open where I live and I see the busses driving around my block. But many parents here are working from home. I documented a few numbers in a previous post showing how the ability to work from home increases with income. In this land of home ownership with three and four-bedroom houses, the snow plows come to clear driveways regularly. Whole Foods and other providers drop off food. Amazon trucks criss-cross the streets, carrying art supplies, and who knows what other items of interest. Cardboard spills out of recycle cans. In less snowy times, children are outside throwing basketballs through the hoops in their driveways. School superintendents live in this suburb.

I bet CDC officials often live in similar places.

Is it safe to open schools? Perhaps it has become safe enough, at least here in Illinois. We are vaccinating teachers as part of the second wave of shots.* But I am not sure that people who live in my suburb should be making decisions for families in poor and urban neighborhoods. However benevolently wielded, that use of power seems presumptuous.

Eduhonesty: Perceptions matter. If a kid is afraid to jump off the high dive, most responsible adults gauge that fear before trying to force that kid off the end of the board. I would encourage a nervous kid, provide more reassurance and support to a frightened counterpart — and I would let a genuinely terrified kid off the hook. High dives can always wait.

Maybe in-person instruction should wait where parents in a neighborhood do not favor that instruction. I hate to burden teachers, but I suggest we employ a model that opens schools with an option for remote learning. I also suggest we provide enough support to teachers so that the 2020/21 school year does not burn them out en masse.

No one should be forced off the high dive. At the same time, many financially struggling parents do need the childcare that school provides. No easy fixes exist for parents living in multigenerational homes who must go out to work.

Disturbingly, though, I am struck by the realization that school opening choices are being made for people based on “what’s good for them.” Who decides that? Using what criteria? Opening decisions may mean well and probably express true concern for children’s learning, but I cannot avoid a cynical fear that potential test score declines, in and of themselves, may be affecting opening decisions.

Few decision makers opening those school districts live in poor neighborhoods. Our mayors, superintendents and governors mostly have excellent insurance. Grandma may be living with them, but if any of those grandmas live near me, I have never met them. More often, grandma is living in her own home with a Life Alert button and visiting caregivers or even full-time help. She may be in an assisted living facility, one that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars upfront for those lucky enough to secure a place.

As I listened to my webinar, I thought how parents in many neighborhoods did not WANT to send children into crowded classrooms. School openings have been slowed or stymied by students who simply did not arrive. From an article in “The New Yorker” (What’s at Stake in the Fight Over Reopening Schools | The New Yorker): “According to one recent study, only eighteen per cent of Black parents and twenty-two per cent of Latinx parents would prefer to send their children back to in-person schooling full time, compared with forty-five per cent of white parents. Over fifty per cent of Black and Latinx parents prefer to keep their children in remote learning.”

These re-openings drip privilege somehow, whether they are meant as well-intended rescues or not.

*About half of U.S. states have not prioritized teacher vaccinations, however.