No doubt by now some people have read my preceding post and are indignant for poor Clarence. She wants him to drop out? What kind of a teacher is she? Doesn’t she know that kid needs an education?

To quote a line from the previous post: How can you come to school almost every day and have a “0″ in more than one class at this point in the quarter? That’s the key question.

I can help answer that question. When his teacher hands Clarence a test or quiz, he does not bother to answer a single question. Ever. When that teacher puts a daily short opener on the board, a five-minute starting activity, he does not bother to do a single one of these starting activities. He writes nothing. He produces nothing.

His teachers, the deans, the counselors, probably the social worker, too — everybody is trying to get work from Clarence. We are failing en masse. If we were merely failing Clarence, I’d sign off without hesitation on the ongoing, progressively more desperate attempts to pull this kid back into the game.

But the cost of this passive-resistant academic behavior extends beyond the borders of Clarence’s desk. So much misbehavior is embedded in the idea of having no points when you are more than 2/3s of the way through the quarter. It’s not like Clarence is just sitting there. He talks nonstop to his friends some days, never about the material, until I give up and send him out. I call his mom. She tells me she is trying but can do nothing with the boy. He writes on desks. He tosses pencils or candy wrappers out the window. He’s got plenty of energy and no desire to enter the learning game. His other teachers are tearing out their proverbial hair trying to find a way to help this kid. If you sit with him, one-on-one, you can make a little headway. He’s not hostile, and he’ll work if he has your full attention. He likes the attention. But in a class of 30 kids, one-on-one time is necessarily limited, especially since many other kids who are trying to learn would love that one-on-one time.

Eduhonesty: Here’s why I hope Clarence drops out when he’s old enough. When I send this boy out for doing no work or for talking — and I mean NO work — then a couple of his friends almost immediately begin working harder and smarter because the interruptions stop. The whole class changes some days. Kids who are frequently looking over at Clarence in disgust look at me in gratitude and we all start enjoying ourselves more. The lesson stays more focused. Student enthusiasm notches up. My own showmanship gets a chance to come out of the closet. As enthusiasm for the topic picks up, my pleasure in answering student questions creates an atmosphere conducive to more questions. Depending on the topic and timing of Clarence’s ejection, overall levels of student learning may not only increase, they may soar. There’s a very real cost to our desperate attempts to keep this boy in the classroom, a cost to every other student in that classroom. It’s past time to ask if our efforts to save Clarence are fair to other students. We wouldn’t let Clarence continually beat up or harass fellow students.

(Well, American education is screwed up enough that I’m not sure we wouldn’t let him do this for a few months, but I like to think that eventually we’d suspend him and after enough time he’d go to an alternative school where he might stay. Or might not. I remember when a girl who’d hit a teacher got sent to an alternative school a few years ago. She returned to school a few weeks later when she got thrown out of the alternative school. The teacher was pretty upset.)

Oops. Went sideways there. To get back on track, Clarence’s antics are not victimless crimes. Other students lose when he is in class. It’s time to let him leave school. If he won’t leave, it’s time to send him home.

I’ll call him Clarence. He’s a good-looking kid, rather tall with sharp features, and an easy smile. He attends school almost every day. I checked his grades this afternoon. We’re most of the way through the second quarter now.

How can you come to school almost every day and have a “0” in more than one class at this point in the quarter?

And why should this kid’s behavior affect my teaching evaluation? The Principal was concerned that he was not occupied for the whole hour since he claimed to be done with his work. He was not close to done. He had just decided to quit. He’s not passing any of his classes and his grades are higher in my classes than in most others. He’s such a pleasant kid on the surface that the Principal does not grasp the many problems he creates while killing time. Talking and distracting the class are only the start. He’s a horrific example. At least so far, he comes to school, does zero work and nothing happens to him.

Eduhonesty: I honestly cannot figure out what is going on with this kid. A lot of us are trying to figure him out. In the meantime, I have him in more than one class with more evaluations coming at me. When his mother told me he might be dropping out next month, I felt a brief surge of hope. Sadly enough, staying in school appears to be no win at all for this kid or his fellow students. His leaving school would benefit us all.

From an article in the Chicago Sun-Times:

“Teachers weren’t happy.

To avert insolvency in North Chicago Community Unit District 187 by 2015, (Paul) Vallas recommended closing four of the district’s nine schools and laying off 130 teachers and staff — 39 percent of the district’s workforce.”

From further down in the same article:

“This is another typical stop on the education-reform road show. These so-called experts spend very little time on the ground and then suggest firing half the staff, closing half the schools, and expect, somehow, to see improvements,” said Aviva Bowen, a spokeswoman for the teachers union.

“Teachers in North Chicago are struggling to serve students with scarce resources. Funding should go into the classrooms, not the pockets of out-of-state consultants,” she said.

Eduhonesty: We are talking about an impoverished district with abysmally low scores on state tests. Many students in districts like this come from single-parent families, families that struggle to survive, families where grandma is in her early thirties and parents never made it through high school. Bigger classes in fewer schools can’t possibly be a good plan. If the district is so broke there’s no alternative — well, I understand financial constraints. But you can bet teachers aren’t happy. Students won’t be either.

The last solution in this situation should be one that decreases the number of teachers.

Here’s the link for anyone who wants to read the full story: http://www.suntimes.com/23976994-761/vallas-cure-for-n-chicago-schools-mass-layoffs-riles-teachers-union.html

She’s a pretty little girl, bordering on beautiful, with elfin features and a confident walk. She only made it through about half of high school. I strongly suspect she can’t read, at least any of the practical papers most adults need to manage daily life.

I don’t know that there’s any way we could have kept Princess’s mom in school. I do know that handing her books she could not read to get her ready for a test she could not pass was a stupid plan. This girl’s far to hardheaded to be pushed around like that. I don’t actually know why she was thrown out of high school. I know that the odds of her staying in school were low to start with. She was living in a gang-oriented culture with little respect for the benefits of higher education. She craved the thug life more than the honor roll. When we try to squash girls like Princess’s mom into some preconceived middle class mold created in the Halls of Congress, teaching almost exclusively to a test that these girls find both incomprehensible and irrelevant, we ensure that many will leave school.

Eduhonesty: Duhhh, as Princess’s mom would say.

She almost always works. She is diligent and attentive. She asks if I need help before I think to ask for help. If her head is down on her desk, I’ll let it go for a minute or two if I can. You can’t allow students to sleep because one head on a desk will become two will become four until the whole classroom becomes a cabbage patch, at least if it’s a first or second period class. In general, bad precedents are to be avoided.

I am not always so good at avoiding bad precedents, though. Sometimes you know a kid just needs a break.

Eduhonesty: This post is for the students of the world who would claim its unfair when the Marilyns get a break that not everyone else receives.

Fair is not always equal. If you always do your homework and always come to class on time, you earn a few extra privileges over the course of the semester. That’s how the world works.

This line comes from a recent professional development opportunity. It’s a nice sound bite.

Will we give up on teachers? I wonder. I wish we would treat our teachers with the compassion and respect we demand for our students. Evaluations under the new Danielson framework seemed designed to weed out teachers who don’t fit the mold. Our students are allowed to learn in many different ways while teachers are required to present common lesson plans using common techniques with common timing requirements and often common assessments — regardless of the differences between their classes. Then those teachers with lower assessments get to fight to keep their jobs, trying to explain that the 10 special education students in period 2 affected results. There’s a chance the Principal will accuse that teacher of making excuses or will smile and utter some unintended threat such as, “yes, but you have to get those students up to grade level.”

An attractive, energetic young colleague told me she was tired of teaching a few days ago, right after her evaluation. I’ve observed her teaching and she’s good. I watched her carry her coffee back to her classroom, sobered by the negative comments. She’s an African-American teacher in the STEM (Science/math) area who can no doubt find alternative employment, possibly at a much higher wage. She’s a great role model.

I don’t know whether to hope she stays in teaching or not. There’s an easier life with higher wages and a great deal more respect waiting for her out there if she decides to opt out.

“Most bad government has grown out of too much government.”
~ Thomas Jefferson

Just a snippet of No Child Left Behind: Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), schools were required to meet AYP or face increasingly severe penalties for failure. Consequences of not meeting AYP for Schools Receiving Title I Funds: Without going into tedious detail, first parents are alerted there is trouble and the school has to make a plan to improve and seek help. If the situation continues the following year, the school notifies parents. The school then must develop and implement a school improvement plan that has been submitted to its district for approval. The district submits the plan to state and county departments of education. The school must provide supplemental services to students who can’t hit the target. If the situation continues for another year, the school must offer a choice of alternative school if one is available.

The government is now giving waivers to schools who did not meet targets, since the deadline has leapt upon us and we are mired in scores that don’t come close to the goals. My favorite target demanded that virtually all special education students reach grade level by 2014.

Eduhonesty:

TAXPAYERS! Ask yourselves — How many new government employees and/or contractors are working on these “improvement plans” by now? I imagine a small country’s worth. If you read the requirements carefully, you will see that bloating of the bureaucracy was inevitable.

Yet despite our increasingly-swollen educational bureaucracies, minimal improvements — if any — can be conclusively documented. We can show score improvements in some areas, often unsustained, but we can’t account for the knowledge drain that occurred to get those improvements. How often has science and social studies been sacrificed to teach students what is on the state test? Geography has pretty much been axed, that’s for sure.

I don’t know if scores went up the year I explained to a high school student that Tacoma was a city, not a country.

The relative nature of time does not receive enough attention. Time seems to go faster as we age. Most people will agree with this statement, adding to a large, swirling cauldron of anecdotal statements, all impossible to prove. Provable or not, though, we need to pay more attention to the stretchy minutes of time.

One reason adolescents often act as if they have forever may lay in this difference in perception between adults and adolescents. Adults are selling long-term, future plans to kids who are slouching in classrooms with no sense of immediacy, no sense that doors may close.

“I’ll do it later,” they say, confident that later will always be available. Doors move slowly in their lives. We exacerbate the problem by giving second, third, fourth etc. chances to students who stray academically or behaviorally.

Eduhonesty: One argument for stricter academic and behavioral policies is this: We need to slam doors in more faces. You did not do your homework? You fail. You started a fight? You are suspended. Do it again and you will be expelled. No third, fourth etc. chances. (I might give a nod to some second chances on a case-by-case basis.) If that sounds heartless, I believe it’s less heartless than leaving kids with the mistaken notion that they will be able to go through their personal doors whenever they feel like it. They won’t. They can’t.

Some good studies document the fact that the ability to learn a foreign language falls off a cliff toward the end of the teen years. Obviously war brides and others who are immersed or highly motivated have learned languages after that time, but true bilingual fluency may become effectively impossible for some.

The problem with all the revolving doors we create is that students don’t take us seriously after awhile. Many can’t understand our urgency because of their own sense that time is crawling by them. We have to convey the idea of closed doors somehow to kids who have been taught to believe that song, “There’s always tomorrow.” It’s a comforting song, a melodious idea that we can make our dreams come true later, supported by the long, lazy days of childhood and adolescence, as well as our generous habit of extending yet one more chance to those who make mistakes.

The song’s nothing but a pretty fiction, though. To put it more bluntly, the song’s a lie. There isn’t always tomorrow. If you screw up high school badly enough, you won’t get to be an undergraduate at Harvard or Princeton or even the University of Montana. You may not get to be an undergraduate anywhere. My student who is about to have her second child? She’s a lovely girl. I would not be surprised if she makes it to college eventually and succeeds in getting at least a practical two year degree. But she won’t do it in the near future. There’s no money and, more importantly, the poor girl’s absolutely exhausted. Her grades are taking a nosedive. I’m just hoping she makes it through high school.

Nobody seems to think about the opportunity costs. To prevent sneaking a listen to IPODs and possible crimes of a more nefarious nature, my school bans hoodies. Many schools do. Others just ban wearing the hoods, which hide earbuds and occasional faces.

The problem is the time sucked by disciplinary issues created by the No-Hoodie Policy. We are reporting kids to Deans, sometimes throwing kids out for insubordination when they refuse to remove the offending garment, talking to them about the need to follow rules, even calling parents to explain the dress code, despite the fact that the code is provided to families at the beginning of the year. How many hours have I lost to hoodies so far this year?

Eduhonesty: I’d let the Battle of the Hoods go. If a few students heard a few more songs, I still suspect we might net out ahead in the fight for educational minutes. Also, these are high school students. At some point we might try trusting them. If we can’t trust at least most of them now, this country’s in a world of hurt.