This post is for all the worried teachers who are posting in various groups, talking about the lack of learning that will be part of the landscape of 2020. Yes, it’s a mess. Some schools had time to prepare packets and work for home. Some did not. Some schools have functional one-to-one device set-ups that have enabled them to shift easily to working remotely with Google classroom. Others simply never had the money to hand out all those Chromebooks to go home. Many students in those financially-challenged districts may live without wi-fi or easy internet access. The old option of sitting in a coffee shop no longer works within Illinois and other states. Those shops are closed.

(Cheat: Although odds are you can park near that coffee shop and use their wi-fi. Having taught in a poor district, I know that some kids across America have been finishing their homework by parking near their school or a handy wi-fi site, and working in the car.)

So what to do? Obviously teachers must follow administrative directives. If you have to keep posting to Google Classroom or whatever alternative you are using, post away. If you must call homes, then make the calls. If admin has stated that school is effectively closed due to the requirement to meet IEPs that cannot be met because the students in question cannot manage remote learning — well, then. You are closed. Accept this fact. The plan where no student is educated because a small group of students cannot be educated off campus has many teachers emoting on social media right now. Like the testing penalties from No Child Behind, this strategy makes little sense and is obviously producing less learning than alternatives. But the legal rationale behind that decision is understandable. Could the district be sued for not meeting its obligations? Probably. This is America. Anybody can sue anybody. A man on “The People’s Court” yesterday was suing the guy his dog had bitten, I think for defaming the dog or something. The district is probably safe from legal “remedies” if it shuts the virtual doors, however.

A tsunami has swept across U.S. education in the last few weeks. Congratulations to all the teachers and parents who are making this stunning shift in routine work somehow. But if it’s not working well, if strange edicts from admin or lack of connectivity are confounding your best efforts, I suggest making a chocolate cake or pulling out the Monopoly game in the closet. Let it go.

I am so sympathetic. When a man or woman has spent years getting kids ready for their next learning adventure, not being able to fulfill that mission can be heartrending. You want all your kids to walk into fifth grade or trigonometry with confidence. But these are wild times and we will have to trust next year’s teachers to patch the holes left in 2020’s knowledge. I have faith that our kids will navigate next year’s challenges.

Eduhonesty: I had mono and relapsed when I was in my first year of high school. That exhaustion and low-grade fever ate up the first half of my freshman experience, but eluded diagnosis until mid-December. The gym teacher glared at me as I sat out swimming, and other teachers seemed absolutely unsympathetic. The only expression of concern I ever got came from a geometry teacher who overheard me telling a friend when they were testing me for rheumatic fever. I was ninety-nine point eight degrees tired enough to walk into a wall, and pale as my notebook paper, but those teachers had never seen me before. The point of this story is I effectively lost the first half of that year. I went home and went straight to sleep. I could not concentrate in class. But I came back. I graduated high in my class and went on to get an M.A. in Secondary Education and a Masters in Business and Public Management.

Our kids will come back from this fractured year. I hope not too many educational leaders will prove stupid enough to worry about the year’s decline in test scores — they’d better decline this year. If they don’t decline, U.S. educational leaders should return control of the classroom to teachers immediately, since the Common Core or latest set of standards and those scripted lesson plans would be shown to be an abysmal failure in light of that result. I hope all those tests will be cancelled.

But our kids will come back. They will fill in the holes they missed, at least the ones they require to move on with their educations. And if they are hazy about the Battle of Shiloh, Siri or Google can fill in the gaps.

It’s going to be awful, but it’s going to be O.K.

Kudos to the districts that are finding ways to keep feeding their students after being told they must close schools. Kudos to the districts that are NOT requiring teachers to go in anyway when the students are gone. Kudos to the districts that are letting teachers bring their children to school when the kids’ district closed but mom or dad’s did not. Kudos to the many teachers trying desperately to make online learning work despite a frequent lack of resources, especially those with children at home. Kudos to all the teachers online who are sharing the strategies they have found that seem to be working.

And shame on America’s leaders for letting us get into such a mess. New York has counted over 729 confirmed COVID-19 cases as of today but believes thousands are out there. Still, officials have not closed schools. Evidence suggests those schools have about 114,000 homeless students — an entirely credible number — who can’t do without the hot meals, medical care and even laundry facilities those schools provide. I understand the rationale for not shutting the school doors, but I look at the facts and see those schools becoming sites of disease transmission — sites that will be sending the new coronavirus back into the impoverished, mostly minority areas that “support” those large homeless populations. According to www.advocatesforchildren.org/node/1403, one in ten students in the New York City district and charter schools are homeless, and 85% of these homeless students are black or Hispanic.

Eduhonesty: All those endless, ongoing debates about providing health insurance to all Americans? The lack of sick leave for U.S. workers? Those homeless populations left to manage on their own? Neglect by government leaders at the highest levels appears to have set up a perfect storm in New York, as well as other places where the poor and the sick will go to work, and their children will go to school.

Because we have left them with no other, better options.

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Update: Within a few hours of publishing this, in response to growing pressure, Mayor de Blasio announced New York schools will be closing for at least a month starting Monday. For at least a week, schools will be open to provide take-out breakfast and lunch. Some schools will be kept open as “learning centers” for the children of essential workers — health care workers and others who are essential to basic functioning of the area. They will also be open to homeless children. The city is gearing up to roll out online learning.

We are all in uncharted territory. I appreciate the immensity of the effort underway. To those people who are becoming concerned about the loss of learning that will occur this year, I’d like to say, let it go. It’s time to cancel the spring tests and let it go.

Just as it’s time for universal healthcare, guaranteed sick leave so people don’t have to drag their feverish bodies into school or work, and a concerted attack on homelessness.

The list of open positions for this week is the longest I have ever seen. I am guessing Corona Virus fears have begun to siphon away the local sub pool. In my last post I counted openings. As of tonight, I find 87 (!) possibilities listed.

Eduhonesty: I am not sure I have written such a straightforward warning piece in the past. But this count is running much too high for this time of year. I don’t know if Corona is inspiring some teachers to stay home with their fevers, teachers who might have trudged through the workday in the past. I suspect that accounts for a few of the openings for substitutes.

But here is what I see coming: in “Yes, We Have No Substitutes Today,” I wrote about the general life of a sub. Subbing tends to pay poorly, but many men and women after retirement enjoy spending days in the classroom. The ability to choose when and whether to work makes subbing perfect for a retiree.

Those retirees are mostly over sixty years of age. No doubt with some hardy exceptions, they will not be getting on cruise ships. They may be avoiding airplanes and other public transit. They will be picking public events carefully. Current CDC advice tells seniors to avoid crowds.

Lunch duty, anyone? I project a rapidly increasing sub shortage in a time when existing shortages often prove problematic. That shortage appears inevitable to me. Many subs are working for love, not money. Many can afford not to work. And damn those kids can get you sick, even without COVID-19. That’s part of why I have been avoiding elementary schools in favor of middle schools lately. I was on antibiotics for almost three weeks last year from two separate febrile illnesses I caught in schools. At least, I think I caught those illnesses in schools. Kids always have runny noses. They are always coughing. Cough. Cough. One boy got up a couple of weeks ago to avoid coughing on his classmates and coughed on his hand and my coat instead.

The sub pool is already shrinking. Those 87 vacancies represent clicks that never happened. My “favorite substitute” emails magnify this impression. I receive emails from the sub site titled “Preferred Substitute Alert,” electronic missives that mostly prove useless because I don’t check my mail often. The last couple of preferred sub openings waited for me, however.

I hate to write this. But if you are a regular teacher right now, I recommend you begin thinking about how you will manage without substitute teachers. In concrete terms, the odds that your planning periods will be stolen are going up fast. Be prepared to work without those periods as you cover for missing colleagues. Be prepared for longer evenings and weekends as grading time disappears. I’d simplify grading as much as possible, skewing toward single-grade group work for example.

And that friend who subs for you? Get that subbing set up if possible. If you don’t have any subs on your preferred list, I’d suggest taking time to talk to possible subs, collaring them in the teacher’s lounge or even your book club or grocery store. Get emails or phone numbers when possible. You may wish to advocate for yourself rather than waiting for the secretaries to make their way down the call list. As I said in my last post, I like to sleep in and I don’t take those calls.

I might sweeten the pot with a little chocolate, too. Or a thank-you note. Going the extra mile to make your substitute feel appreciated could simplify life greatly when you find you must be out of the classroom. While many subs may be going on sabbatical, others will not. You want to connect to those hardy souls. Even if the retirees begin to duck, I suspect the aspiring young teachers trying to make an employment connection will not.

Advocate for your district, too. Recruit new subs if possible. A few days ago, a friend of mine told me her district had plenty of openings. They had just begun eliminating preferred subs in hopes that by posting all possible jobs, they might get more subs to make that critical click, that “yes, I’ll cover your social studies classes on Friday.”

I imagine this post remains unnecessary for many readers, especially in the heartland. A colleague was complaining yesterday about all the required new procedures in her school, given that her state still did not have single confirmed COVID-19 case. My sympathy goes out to the confused people in states with no or almost no cases who are wondering where the toilet paper, paper towels, rubbing alcohol, bottled water, hand sanitizer and masks are going. (I am truly baffled by the run on water especially.) Regardless, I looked at those 87 jobs and thought it might be time to write this post.

Forewarned is forearmed.

(Note: Written not long before COVID took off, making an already fraught situation worse.)

This post was inspired by a sad lament online from a colleague who asked if other teachers regularly lost their planning periods to cover for absent teachers when no substitute was available. The group answer was a resounding “Yes!”

I knew that answer before I read any comments. I had seen similar posts before — and I had been filling in for missing teachers regularly until I retired. Now, sometimes I rescue teachers by substitute teaching. But sometimes I don’t and I thought I might offer a snapshot of reasons behind this hidden teaching hazard.

I will be subbing this afternoon for a Spanish teacher in a state-award-winning school that I trust to provide me with a fun opportunity to help kids learn. I will not be paid “well” — subs around here are absurdly underpaid sometimes for their education levels. I would make $100 per day if I worked the whole day. A few districts I know pay better, but none more than $125 per day. That breaks out to slightly more than $15 per hour — not much for a woman with two Master’s degrees and multiple certifications including high school mathematics, French and Spanish. But if I were in this job for the pay, I would never bother to sub at all. Starbucks would give me free coffee, college classes and health care for about the same wage. Subbing gives me no benefits at all. (Well, sometimes there’s a Keurig cup of peppermint tea in the deal, or leftovers in the teacher’s lounge. Those Keurig machines don’t get cleaned often, however.)

I do enjoy teaching and it gets me out of my pajamas, but I do it for love, not money.

I mostly just work afternoons lately. I prefer to go to bed around midnight and get up around 9 A.M. So I am not picking up those morning subbing positions. I would rather sleep in. I am not picking up full-day positions. I don’t need the money, I don’t want to get up, and I don’t want to work that hard.

The one great advantage to subbing rests in work flexibility. If I want Tuesday off, I am off. I pick my hours. Or I don’t pick any hours.

It’s Monday morning. For the sake of this post, I go to look at vacancies available. There are seven morning jobs out there. I don’t know how many day jobs are going unfilled because once I choose an afternoon job, the day and afternoon postings disappear from my feed. Of more importance, I see fifteen jobs posted for tomorrow. I would bet most of those vacancies will still be there tomorrow. A few will be taken, but others will pop up as teachers and their children get sick or are called to emergency meetings. I check later as I return to finish this post: There are now 26 vacancies for tomorrow and it’s 10:47 PM. If no one has taken those jobs by now, no one is likely to take them. Those 26 are not all the jobs in my districts, either. For all I know, another 26 jobs are going begging. I work for four districts, three relatively small, one medium sized, but I don’t see all the positions available. My feed favors locations where I am known to work. A number of elementary schools gave up on me awhile back, since I ignore them in favor of the middle schools.

The missing substitute problem tends to get worse in my area as the year goes by. In the past, retired subs were only allowed to work 500 hours over the school year here in suburban Illinois. Now that total allowed has risen up to 600 hours, but in May secretaries will be scrambling to make morning phone calls. “Please, please, can you come in?” They sound so desperate.

I am mostly asleep with my phone turned off when those calls are made, but every so often I awaken early and pity moves me to rescue struggling colleagues. Because I remember those days. Oops. My alleged planning period? What planning period? By the end, I never counted on a single hour to plan/grade/tutor or anything else during the school day. I might be math or I might be English. I might even be covering P.E. I might find a decent lesson plan to use. Or I might have nothing. That teacher who had intended to be out could mostly be counted on to supply decent guidelines for the hour, but teachers with a sudden case of the stomach flu? Any plans might be hopelessly outdated. I have stood in a classroom while a kindergarten colleague wrote the kinder schedule down, using a doorframe to steady her scrap of paper. That was all the plan I got that day.

But I am drifting away from my purpose in this post. I want to help salvage a few planning periods. I want to explain why some teachers are losing their planning time so regularly. Pay is part of the picture. But I am doing most of my subbing lately in my two lowest paying districts. I’ll list some reasons: 1) The lesson plans in these schools are always adequate and often much better than adequate. They fill the hour. Mostly, the plans advance learning and give me an actual chance to teach. They provide fallbacks for failed technology and sometimes even differentiation for kids who have IEPs. 2) The administration has my back. In the last few weeks, I sent two kids out of classrooms for gross misbehavior. I have spent enough years in Title One schools so that I can manage an occasional wild ride, but I also know a major problem behavior when I see one. In one school, the student was sent back after three minutes because, the Dean said, “she promised to be good.” In the other, the Principal called home. That second school will be seeing a lot more of me this year than the first school. In fact, I may be done with the first school. I simply don’t need the aggravation. 3) Some schools redeploy me less often. I understand that in a subbing crisis, I may become a missing kindergarten teacher instead of the bilingual resource teacher I had planned to be. But when that change happens too often, I am going to avoid the school where it happens. Especially if I end up being three people with no breaks, I probably won’t be back.

I am thinking of the Titanic as I write this. A ship can only take on so much water in so many compartments. I understand icebergs happen. Angry, tired ED kids who miss their familiar teacher try to drive outsiders away. Lesson plans can blow up for a great variety of reasons, especially when created under time pressure by people with a rising fever. Uncertainty is part and parcel of subbing. But a tipping point exists in subbing, that unknown moment when a given sub looks at the posting for Titanic Middle School and says, “Nope. Not again.”

Eduhonesty: So what can you do to help yourself, fellow teacher? Be the teacher who convinces the sub to come back. Have an emergency sub plan that works. Make sure whatever plan you leave takes the full class period: Much better too much than too little.

Set up a plan for disciplinary contingencies and spell out how that works. Who does the sub need to call when a student has slipped from classroom managed behaviors into racial slurs, for example? Are there referral forms available? Leave a few in the sub folder. Kids take referral forms seriously sometimes, even if written by the sub. Writing has a certain power. I have always been entertained by how much more well-behaved a classroom becomes if I start walking around while writing on a clipboard. I could be scrawling down my Costco list, but behaviors usually improve immediately.

Encourage subs to come back. Say “Hi!” in the hallway. Offer support if you are teaching nearby. Put the better subs on your preferred sub list.

You will have better and worse subs. Except in dire situations, I’d suggest not putting people on any “no sub” list your school might have. The problem with adding to that list of people not allowed to sub is that any time you decrease the number of available subs, you increase the odds that a vacancy will go unfilled, sucking up your planning time. You also increase the odds that another, better sub will end up redeployed, suddenly teaching kindergarten instead of the fifth grade position that sub had originally chosen. You increase the odds that the better sub will lose those music and gym breaks to cover for multiple teachers who are out, making for a tougher day. I’d suggest teachers hang onto those marginally competent subs simply because the number of jobs available in many areas exceeds the number of subs available — and every one of those unfilled jobs may result in a regular teacher having to pick up classes during planning times. Or may result in a better sub deciding to work for the Carpathia School down the street, where he or she can almost always count on getting that fifth grade position without worrying about suddenly being the gym teacher instead.

I think I’ll stop here and post this although I may add to it for the next few days.

I should probably add one note. I think kindergarten teachers are absolute heroes, and massively underappreciated. They ended up as my examples simply because I find my natural niche seems to be middle school. That sea of hands holding up gloves in the midwestern winter — well, I never seem to know how to budget time and manage all those zippers, laces and other bits of outerwear. And then there are the shoelaces that keep untying themselves all day… I honestly don’t know how kindergarten teachers do it.

My junior high school Spanish teacher and I are friends on Facebook. I found her after a bit of internet searching and met her for coffee one day when I had flown home to visit my parents. Some decades have passed since I did dialogs in her class in Tacoma, Washington, but I still remember snippets of those exchanges.

“¿A dónde vas Tomás, a clase?”
“No, voy a la oficina del director.”

Those junior high Spanish classes led to high school Spanish (as well as French and Latin) and months of travel in Mexico. I went on to take Spanish in college, mostly to pick up an easy “A” or two along the way, accidentally accumulating a minor’s worth of credits. Years later, I found I had all the credits I needed for a Spanish teaching endorsement in Illinois. That endorsement got me my first job. I finished my student teaching in high school mathematics, but could not find a local mathematics position, so I accepted a high school Spanish position instead. My Spanish helped me segue into bilingual education a few years later.

Eduhonesty: Your mission, readers, should you decide to accept it, is to try to find that nurse, teacher, social worker, or other adult who made a difference when you were a kid. That quest may fail. I was too late to thank the marvelous Bolivian guy who taught me high school Spanish.

But you might get lucky. And on a gray, February day, or any other day, teachers, nurses, social workers, paraprofessionals, security guards, and all those many people who dedicate their lives to helping kids can use a boost — a reminder of how much their work matters.

P.S. The former elementary school teacher pictured above was also a Facebook friend. The picture was taken at her 95th birthday party.

Politicians talk about protecting America from lazy teachers. In my years in education, I have known almost no lazy teachers. For one thing, kids tend to push those teachers out. When a teacher does not care about students’ progress, students detect that lack of interest and start heaping on the abuse. They usually make those teachers completely miserable.

Lazy teachers form a miniscule percentage of the men and women who teach. In fact, the words “lazy teacher” are an oxymoron in my view, a perspective formed by many 70-plus hour weeks in education, by the week-ends I grade grade graded before preparing more lessons to grade later. Parent calls and emails take time. Administrative demands take time — general staff meetings, test and other data demands that often require whole spreadsheets or PowerPoints, peer collaboration meetings, and the many random requests for information that pop up in morning emails. And all of those demands supersede mandatory educational and professional development. How many Saturday and evening classes have I taken? I can’t remember. I loved my linguistics class at National Louis University, scheduled on Saturdays across from Chicago’s Art Institute. Bilingual teachers were expected to take linguistics or some forgotten alternative, and that class left me with an afternoon free to explore art. But many classes were evening exercises in missing dinner with my family. Tutoring students before and after school takes time, as does hammering out that common lesson plan that matches the district’s curricular requirements.  Life’s a little easier for elementary teachers than secondary math teachers, I admit, but all those elephants and other critters don’t mysteriously appear out of nowhere, and they aren’t put on the walls of classrooms by friendly elves and fairies.

I bring up the issue of so-called lazy teachers because they are often presented as a rationale for trying to eliminate unions. In a broader sense, they have become whipping boys and girls for people who don’t want to acknowledge a truth: The differences that make up the achievement gap — better called the opportunity gap — cannot be fixed by better teaching, at least not better teaching by itself. For proof, we might look at No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and the Common Core. Nearly two decades after the implementation of these programs that punished schools and teachers for not delivering better test results, test results have hardly risen in many areas. Those results sometimes have even fallen despite frantic administrative efforts in lower-scoring districts. I attribute that lack of improvement to the fact that many, many people were already teaching as hard as they could.

The idea that our achievement gap results from differences in teacher quality is a misconception at best, and an outright lie at worst. I understand why this lie continues to be propagated. If teachers are the problem, then fixing teachers should fix the problem. Many stakeholders crave a simple, quick fix.

We will not find that simple fix.

From a 2012 article at https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/survey-teachers-work-53-hours-per-week-on-average/2012/03/16/gIQAqGxYGS_blog.html:

A new report from Scholastic and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, called Primary Sources: America’s Teachers on the Teaching Profession, finally quantifies just how hard teachers work: 10 hours and 40 minutes a day on average. That’s a 53-hour work week!

Work hours have only been going up in my experience since that Post article. The article goes on to note that teachers who advise extracurricular clubs, such as the Spanish Club I once sponsored, or who coach sports put in 11 hours and 20 minutes in an average day. For that matter, I can’t count the minutes I spent watching soccer and basketball games I never coached, simply because good teachers often attend student sporting events. Nothing helps cement a student-teacher relationship more than being able to talk intelligently about yesterday’s winning basket or goal.

These are the teachers I know. More and more often, they are giving up summer hours for continuing education, summer school, and other professional development or committee work. Not long ago, I spent the evening with a charter school professional who sometimes spends 100 hours on her job in the course of a week. But I know public school teachers who are spending their evenings grading 130 math homework papers, and week-ends filling out multipage lesson plans as they chart the next week of 130 math homework papers per night.

Eduhonesty: We seem to have been looking for a quick fix for decades. That fix will not be new, different teachers, just as that fix has not been changed standards or punishments for poor test scores. That fix will not be the dismantling of unions. Unions have protected a small percentage of teachers who should have been replaced. I cannot disagree with that position. But mostly unions have supplied protection to teachers who are being held responsible for results that frequently have everything to do with homelessness, hunger, depression, anxiety, and gunfire in the night, rather than teaching techniques. 

The only true fix I can see involves giving more educational time and resources to kids who have fallen behind. Rather than pointing fingers at teachers, we should be scrutinizing the 180-day school year. Some kids are doing great with that short year. Others have fallen behind. Those victims of the achievement gap should not be tossed out the door on May 31st if they have not mastered their year’s material. At the very least, our academically-struggling students should attend mandatory summer school until they have a chance to catch up to the students who have gone on ahead of them.

Blaming teachers takes our focus away from the real problem — the lack of resources available to help catch up those students who have fallen behind. I still remember one year of summer school with no busses.

“If parents want their children to get ahead, they will find a way to get them to school,” an administrator told me when I asked how this bus-less plan was supposed to work.

I can’t remember what I answered. I’m sure what I thought was a version of, “Damn, woman, those parents work, and most of their kids don’t want to go to summer school in the first place.”

Those missing busses were critical, but busses cost money no one could find in that district’s annual mostly-in-the-red budget. In the absence of air-conditioning in the same district, though, I did not intend to teach summer school that year anyway, I figured younger, healthier, stronger souls could take on those eighty to ninety degree small classes.

I took the summer “off” and took education classes in air-conditioned university classrooms instead.

Poverty Rate of Children Ages 5 to 17 by County

This is a slightly updated replay of a post written shortly before my retirement. I don’t want these thoughts on unions to get lost in time. Unions create a power base for workers who lack power — which nowadays seems to be almost everyone putting on a work uniform.

The push to discredit unions has been underway for decades, fueled by powerful business interests, by men and women who would rather not pay any minimum wage at all. But at some point, a great many working Americans also bought into stories of laziness, ineptitude and unfairness that were used to depict unions as losers for education and other industries.

Speaking of fake news…

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I’d like share what may be my favorite professional development quote of all time: “Anyone who feels you’re overwhelmed, you are in the right spot. That’s the nature of teaching.” The presenter from the Danielson group had natural rhetorical flair. She had her audience at that point, all eyes glued up front.

There’s a lot of overwhelmed going around.

My students’ parents often feel overwhelmed. They share this when I call about classroom problems, explaining the difficulty of parenting while working two jobs. How do people live on minimum wage? They work two jobs and take as many hours as they can get, mostly as many as employers will allow without being required to provide benefits. Two jobs of less than thirty hours each can still equal nearly sixty hours of back-breaking labor — and I have talked to parents who worked three jobs to survive.

As I listen to these exhausted moms and dads, I think: We are not the better for the gutting of America’s unions. U.S. students knew more in the past, especially if breadth of knowledge is taken into account. Despite the dumbing down of state tests that has occurred over the last few decades — I’m sure a major contributor to the attempts to develop a national test like PARCC — the data demonstrates a decline in American academic strength. That academic strength occurred in a time of strong unions. The unions have not been the problem with American education, despite anecdotal stories about rare teachers who were protected from job loss unfairly.

Eduhonesty: I know that test-score mania and social science numbers have become tools to use to break unions, despite a total dearth of evidence that unions were the cause of America’s test-score problems. America has simply become labor unfriendly in general. But those lower scores are used to justify charters and school reorganizations, reorganizations that seldom produce desired results. The charter movement along with those fired administrations in reorganized schools have been a fact for more than ten years now. Yet test scores are stagnant and even falling in some places.

An international exam (PISA) shows that American 15-year-olds are stagnant in reading and math even though the country has spent billions to close gaps with the rest of the world. This has been true since the year 2000. The achievement gap in reading is even widening.

I refer readers to https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/us/us-students-international-test-scores.html for more details.

I didn’t used to believe in unions. I do now. If the nature of teaching is to be overwhelmed, perhaps teachers need some protection. When I started in this profession, I had reliable planning periods. I don’t now. There’s a planning period on my schedule, but I’ve never been able to depend on that period. After most of a year of stress and complaints by teachers, an email went out saying that Friday meetings were to be eliminated so teachers could have one guaranteed planning period. But I am teaching two subjects. If I don’t meet on Friday, when does that second, required lesson plan get done? I sometimes subbed during my planning period until we finally hired building substitute teachers (I loved that day when I was supposed to meet with the Assistant Superintendent for the District, but he had to cancel because he was supposed to sub in my school. That probably got us our building subs.)

No job should be overwhelming by its nature, not without some attempt to fix the working conditions creating that state of emotional turmoil. Overwhelmed teachers cannot be good for students. Overwhelmed teachers are defecting from the profession in big numbers, too. The estimate that half leave the profession within the first five years may be accurate. (Then again, that number may be more social science hooey. Who really knows? I know I started in my district with a group of more than 10 other, new teachers, all of whom are gone.) Why do we allow these toxic working conditions?

Many Americans need to reconsider the idea of unions in my opinion. United, American workers once created a middle class. United, we created schools that the world envied. That middle class appears to be slipping away for many hard workers. Those schools have become objects of pity and even scorn by other countries. If we don’t stand together, what will happen to the workers and teachers in this country? Who will take care of us? Not those many employers who are calculatingly keeping millions of Americans below the threshold hours for benefits. Not those school districts who are broke and can save $30,000 by replacing experienced Maria with newly-graduated Juan. Throw in required governmental purges of educational staff, and the landscape’s looking increasingly bleak out in pockets of America.

It’s time to support our unions again. It’s past time to help those workers who are working two jobs just to make the rent and buy enough food for the family. In the past, one argument against unions consisted of the idea that corporations and school districts would take care of their employees, paternally looking out for members of their organizational family. Surely no one trusts in that idea today. Where are the benefits of yesteryear? If a single one of my students’ parents is receiving those benefits, I’ve never heard about it. I’ve heard my share of sad stories, though, like the story from one mom working in the “backroom” for two years, trying her hardest to get a job “on the floor.” On the floor, they get benefits, but for many workers, that floor might as well be the moon.

I’ve got two separate posts melded into one here. Teachers are not factory workers or burger servers. The problems of teachers may overlap with those of unskilled workers, though, even if that overlap diverges at points. Still, I plan to keep this post as it is, since I think my general point applies cleanly to both groups: We need to organize. We need not to be ashamed or intimidated by the thought of organizing.

To quote one of my favorite historical figures, Benjamin Franklin: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

P.S. If Costco can pay its employees a living wage, I’ll submit that Walmart probably can too. Paying that wage would increase Walmart’s prices, but Walmart workers could then funnel more money into the economy generally. The demand for decent working conditions with an eventual retirement plan should not be regarded as some form of gouging.

Click on the pics to appreciate the full ugliness.

The problem with evidence as defined by test scores is that data can always be manipulated. In honest hands, this manipulation does not usually produce misleading results — although not all data handlers know the meaning of the numbers they crunch and some may boldly assert “facts” unsupported by their numbers — but many stakeholders in education are under pressure to produce results. It’s a short step from optimistic interpretation to deceit. When the results show annual growth of 1.05 years from a benchmark test, that may be presented as “has shown dramatic improvement until our 2nd grade is exceeding expectations and producing over a year’s academic improvement now!” Ummm… That 0.05 growth above the 1.0? That 0.05 may not be statistically meaningful. There may be no growth or slightly less than one year’s growth.

Other problems with data:

Many teachers are forced to compile, record and keep data that is never ever used. Somebody’s great idea creates days of extra work throughout a school, but then no administrator ever finds time to sit down with the resulting forms and spreadsheets to figure out what the numbers reveal.

None of the spreadsheets from my last year before retirement affected instruction. We were kept on the common lesson plan whether our students could read and understand the questions or not. I proved and proved that my students could not read the Common Core tests I was obliged to give, explained the problem with giving 7th grade tests in English to bilingual students who were reading English at a third grade level and sometimes Spanish at an even lower level. But nothing changed and the tests kept being handed to me along with threats if I resisted those useless tests and quizzes.

I have shown a few of these tests. I’ll insert one more.

The cost of data gathering goes unremarked too often, especially now that most data lives out its life electronically. Those old-fashioned dollar losses from stacks of paper and ink at least highlighted wastage sometimes, as recycling bins and waste paper baskets filled up. The paper was visible. The hours spent at computers and in subsequent meetings and trainings are harder to track. The opportunity costs are impossible to track. For example, essay tests have mostly become a thing of the past. After complying with data requirements, many teachers don’t have time to grade such tests. The shift toward multiple choice has come about in part because those tests are good standardized test practice, but also because data requirements frequently don’t leave a whole evening or day to grade students’ essays properly — or even to grade piles of essays at all.

Eduhonesty: The opportunity costs from gathering data are kneecapping education. Time is stolen from lesson preparation all up and down the line, until buying lessons from Teachers Pay Teachers becomes some teachers’ only hope, while others use required lesson plans that they know are not as good as what they might be able to prepare themselves — if given back the time stolen by Spreadsheet #42.

I am by no means against gathering and analyzing educational data. Data is required so educators can determine how well instruction is working. But data demands have been exploding in the recent past, and I wrote this post to highlight one point: Data demands have opportunity costs. The time to prepare data is taken out of lesson preparation, grading, tutoring, materials preparation, and other student-centered activities.

And to what end? Our international test scores remain fairly stagnant. In some locations, scores have been declining over time despite this full court data press. I strongly suspect that excessive demands for data not only reflect this lack of progress — THEY CREATE A PORTION OF THE LOST LEARNING WE ARE BUSY DOCUMENTING.

“Scenario: You just got a job as a grave digger. The job pays $25,710. You are so happy! But unfortunately, you smell bad when you come home – even worse than when you worked in the pickle factory — and you are being kicked out of your house. So you have decided to get your own apartment. After taxes, you take home $17,000. You owe $600 on your two credit cards which have a limit of $2,000. Your car payment is $200 a month with an additional $100 or so going to gas. How much can you spend on an apartment? How much should you spend on an apartment? What are the most important factors affecting your choice? List 3.”

Having stumbled on this while cleaning up my desktop computer, across the years, I still like the short scenario I wrote. I probably would have given credit for “not enough money due to the risk of zombies and price of apartments,” then and now. Scripted common lesson plans were a real loser for me. It was seldom worth the time to try to get everyone to use my scenario. It was easier to use the one someone found in a book. I am certain those by-committee plans did not benefit my students.

John LeCarre once said that “a committee is an animal with four back legs.” That was my experience of education toward the end, as my foreshortened, slightly early retirement paperwork was put in the pipeline. I could have helped more, I’m sure. But those eight meetings a week were wearing me down. I still remember people looking at me, their eyes saying, “Say something!” I had always been a person who could be relied upon to stand up against the more blatant craziness. I stopped saying my somethings, though, because too often my best efforts failed and they always lengthened the meeting.

From NPR:

“This is the canary in the coal mine. Several big states have seen alarming drops in enrollment at teacher training programs. The numbers are grim among some of the nation’s largest producers of new teachers: In California, enrollment is down 53 percent over the past five years. It’s down sharply in New York and Texas as well.

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/03/03/389282733/where-have-all-the-teachers-gone

Eduhonesty: That coming teacher shortage? Teaching was once a creative job that did not pay well, one that offered an uplifting chance to help children. “Educational reformers” are sucking the creativity out of the job, while simultaneously making the lives of those children a nonstop stream of sometimes incomprehensible work. Too often that work is designed by outsiders who have never met those children. Teachers may not be allowed to design or use their own materials. Teachers may have virtually no autonomy — at which point, as students become more lost, some begin to feel like failures.

Umm… as I look at today’s teaching environment, I wonder: what part of today’s teacher exodus is even remotely surprising? To paraphrase Harry Potter’s nemesis, Lucius Malfoy: What’s the use in being a disgrace to the name of teacher, if they don’t even pay you well for it?

I’ll keep hammering on one particular nail in hopes that I am not hammering it into a coffin: Sensitive children may believe that low standardized test scores reflect how capable they are in general. When a child receives a low score on a test that his or her teacher called “important,” that child begins to try to figure out what that score means. By middle school, many kids think they know the answer. I ask them where a test or quiz went wrong and they answer:

“I’m just dumb, Ms. Turner.”

Suddenly, a minor glitch in math learning has become a car wreck in motion in front of me. By the time I start damage control, though, my student may already be bent or even broken. How many years was “Alex” rolling over in the ditch carrying that toxic self-view before I stumbled onto it?

I am not saying students should never receive low scores. If you don’t know a mathematical concept, you should not pass the quiz or test. What I am saying is that high-stakes testing can do long-term damage — a fact teachers know and more educational reformers need to understand.

This test, test, testing? It’s vital to keep in mind that some students will take a poor grade and decide to work harder. Others will give up. I am convinced that “failing” state tests year after year makes some students exit the academic arena, a place where they cannot effectively compete. While we must have unfamiliar material on standardized tests, we are long past due at deemphasizing those tests. Teachers explain that we do not expect students to be able to answer everything on the test and that we only want to learn what they know so that we can figure out exactly what to teach them. BUT ALWAYS COMING IN ON THE BOTTOM OF TEST DISTRIBUTIONS — A POSITION NICELY LAID OUT IN MANY BAR GRAPHS OF RESULTS — TAKES ON A MEANING OF ITS OWN, NO MATTER WHAT THE TEACHER SAYS.

“I’m just dumb, Ms. Turner.”

Kids don’t enter school thinking about themselves this way. They learn this view. High-stakes testing teaches this view — despite all our attempts at deemphasizing test results and creating positive self-images.

P.S. And frankly, if a test cannot tell us what our students need to be taught, we need to scrap the test. A state test that does not come in until after the school year ends is an abominable waste of time.