The magic professional development that will produce a Better Teacher able to motivate a student to successfully condense multiple missing years of knowledge into around 160 days, all the while simultaneously mastering a curriculum that requires understanding those thousands of bits of missing knowledge from past years? The politicians who believe in a professional development of that awesome power might as well believe in basilisks, boggarts and mountain trolls from Harry Potter. Yes, an infinitesimal percentage of children make the leap I describe when given intensive tutoring. But a student testing at a third-grade level in mathematics can usually be expected to fold when confronting an eighth-grade curriculum.

The Myth of the Magic Teacher helps no one. Especially with the many days districts are losing now to testing and data-production, I ask readers to please, please believe me: The magic teacher training formula does not exist. No magic “quality time” can compensate for the missing “quantity time” required to fill in large gaps from the past. No quick fix for the achievement gap is going to be found. Yes, we can make better teachers and administrators. We can help teachers to create safer, more productive classrooms. We can help administrators to make the best use of available staff and materials.

In the meantime, though, we will continue to get what we get. I remember this phrase from a long-ago, powerful professional development, “You get what you get.” The woman continued by explaining that we could not teach what we wanted to teach – we had to focus on what our students were ready to learn. That PD took place at the beginning of my teaching career and it made all the sense in the world.

But the testing and standards movements have been ignoring individual students. Schools try to compensate by grouping children and adapting instruction for different groups. However, when every group is expected to be learning how to manage polynomial equations such as x² – 2x +3 = 0 because these equations will be on the spring test, our differentiation tends to become more lip service than real. Standards can and do hobble reasonable attempts to individualize instruction. Curricula designed to cover all or the most important topics on the state test do the same.

If we insist on continuing to push preset standards and tests as the be-all-end-all in educational strategies – I wish we’d go back a few decades and just STOP – then I think we are past due at facing facts. Kids are being left behind all the time. No Child Left Behind shifted our focus to tests but did not dramatically change the picture being shown by those tests. The subtitle of a U.S. News and World Report article lays it out succinctly: “Only 37 percent of students are prepared for college level math and reading, according to newly released data.” The related NAEP data shows declines from 2013 to 2015, too.*

What can we do to help America’s underachieving young adults? And the children following them? I can think of one and only one fix that I believe has the potential to work: we could extend the time underachieving students spend in school. I’d start with a robust preschool education aimed at teaching vocabulary as part of a mostly play experience. Then I would create programs that attack growing gaps in student knowledge, stepping in immediately to fill the gaps instead of passing kids along – before students end up utterly lost as they log into their Google classroom to find assignments they do not even know how to start — and long before those students are forced to pay for college math and English remediation courses that don’t count toward their possible graduation.

* Camera, Laura. “High School Seniors Aren’t College-Ready. U.S. News and World Report, 27 Apr 2016