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.

“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow
as the other deepest thing.”

~ Naomi Shihab Nye, Kindness  (with credit to Bob at lakesideadvisors.com)

Why did I copy this quote? In a spasm of compassion, I saw my students. Where is the kindness in the endless barrage of testing? Where is the empathy that might help data-driven leaders of our time to understand the sorrow they are creating?

Students feel the pressure to get test scores which remain out of reach for them, those students who have not simply given up, trying to protect themselves from yet another emotional blow. They feel the sadness when they fail to come close to hitting expected targets. They feel a gamut of emotions, few of them helpful to building confidence or self-esteem. How does it feel after hours of answering questions if most of the time you don’t know the answers? So many students are far from ready for the Common Core-based questions in many of these tests — special education students, bilingual students and those students who have fallen behind grade level for whatever reason.

Eduhonesty: When I bring this subject up with educational administrators, I am often treated to a speech about how we must get students ready to succeed. Failure is not an option, they say in so many words. Failure will be reflected in your evaluations, too.

But a review of the immense load of big data we are creating reveals that a great many students ARE failing. We document those failures all over school, state and federal websites. The cold numbers do not tell a larger story that needs to be placed front and center for the sake of America’s lower-scoring students. Testing hurts.

Testing has become unkind in the extreme. You must test whether you can read the test or not. You must test if you came here two years ago from Cambodia without speaking English. You must test even if you are innumerate, illiterate and a lifelong special education student. You must test whether you are destined to fail or not.

Here’s the question that desperately needs to be asked: How are these failures — often repeated failures — making our students feel? I have watched such sadness on children’s faces at the end of demanding test days, and hopelessness as well.

We don’t need to throw special education students who are academically delayed into the testing arena to be chewed up. A desire for data should not be allowed to triumph over common sense. One-test-fits-all is not merely stupid; it’s a recipe for lifetime sorrow. We are making kids feel like failures with these tests.

Emotional effects of the data juggernaut are dismissed in the quest for more data, big data that we cannot even effectively analyze due to questions of methodology, validity and reliability, not to mention the sheer lack of time and personnel needed to tease out useful results from that data.

Hello out there? Let’s stop the data train — or at least slow it down. It’s running over many kids, the ones in the far left tail of the bell curves of our tests. I wish bureaucrats and administrators could see some of the beaten, hopeless expressions at the end of a day of school testing. We are teaching sorrow and failure, while we ignore simple human kindness.

Nouns keep turning into verbs lately and let’s science, I say. In particular, I’d like to follow up more vigorously on the studies that suggest laptops and notepads are not improving learning outcomes. Research suggesting that our headlong leap into technological learning may not be fulfilling expectations has been cropping up in the news for awhile. But those studies don’t seem to be impacting school district behavior much. Maybe more science will help.

A report came out in 2015 from the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), examining the effect of school technology on international test results. Using the Pisa tests taken in more than 70 countries, the report claimed that frequent use of computers in classrooms does not produce the results many advocates of technology expect, but is frequently associated with lower test results instead. The OECD report claimed that “education systems which have invested heavily in information and communications technology have seen ‘no noticeable improvement’ in Pisa test results for reading, mathematics or science.”

The results of this study ought to slow or stop our headlong rush into 1:1 laptops as a possible method for closing the achievement gap. According to the study, “there is no single country in which the internet is used frequently at school by a majority of students and where students’ performance improved”. More crucially, among “the seven countries with the highest level of internet use in school, … three experienced “significant declines” in reading performance – Australia, New Zealand and Sweden – and three more …”stagnated” – Spain, Norway and Denmark.”

Technology is no panacea. I refer readers to https://www.bbc.com/news/business-34174796, an article by Sean Coughlan from September of 2015, for more details from this report. The articles shows greater and lesser successes from adding technology.

What I would like to see: Let’s find large districts with at least two schools that produce highly similar spring test results. In one school, ban all student electronics except for keyboarding classes in a computer lab. (Keyboarding has too much utility to sacrifice to my experiment.) In the other school, continue with laptops, software, and possible loose phone policies. In the lower-tech school, students will take notes on lined paper and assignments will be done and turned in on paper. I recommend we do this across multiple large districts. The more data in this experiment, the better.

Come spring, we can look at results to see which group did better, assuming either group outperforms its counterpart. I predict the paper and pencil classrooms will do at least as well as their techy counterparts — and for far less money. If I am right, then IT’S TIME TO STOP REFLEXIVELY BUYING NEW TECHNOLOGY AND SOFTWARE. Instead of throwing funds at laptop carts, districts might invest their limited funds in more tutors, activity busses, infrastructure repair and better classroom climate control, for example.

Eduhonesty: I see advantages in laptops and robust software programs. I also see an enormous amount of time wasted on secret games and other activities. As a retired teacher/sub, I am more likely to see those games and YouTube diversions because kids often try to take advantage of the sub. In unfamiliar rooms, I have to close a few Chromebooks and “X” a few games or videos before they stop most days. But kids have been switching activities when the teacher approached since laptops entered the classroom. How much wasted time is too much wasted time?

As to phones, yes, they have calculators. Yes, they have search engines. But given the temptations of social media, phones should be kept in lockers or other secure sites.

We should not have to science this topic. The data available ought to be sufficient to help us make choices by now. But I keep walking into classes filled with laptops that are not working the way they are supposed to work.

Here is my admittedly anecdotal observation: Those high-achieving kids at the top of the class are reading their Newsela Paleontology articles. They are taking the quizzes the teacher assigned, providing the writing sample, and doing the critical thinking activity that is to be turned in for a grade. But despite regular redirection the kids at the bottom of the class and the more distractible kids in the middle are doing… something else, at least until I am nearby. As I approach, they click back to the picture of dinosaur bones that I saw the last two times I circled the room. Of more concern, a number of kids in the crowd are not bothering to read the quiz associated with the reading since there is no grade associated with that “self-learning” quiz. Then they are laughing about their zeroes. One girl yesterday asked me to give her the letters of the answers. “Can’t you just tell me? You know, CAEE or something?”

If I wasn’t a teacher and did not feel compelled to teach the material the classroom teacher provided me, those laptops would be a tremendous win. I could sit at the front of the room and watch as the screens quieted the classroom. The kids would look busy. I could wander out a few times to make people click away from the snakes game and go back to staring at the picture of the dinosaur bones, and the fiction of classroom learning would be maintained. But I know better. The kids know better, too, but the ones ignoring the assignment have decided they can catch up later or that paleontology simply isn’t worth the effort. I assume they mostly made up some version of a critical thinking response to turn in for a grade.

This picture’s not as bleak as I painted. I circled the room I am describing and redirected kids nonstop. A great deal of work was accomplished. But I also know that not all subs are getting in their 10,000 steps. Not all teachers are able to endlessly circle a room all day.

The problem with technology is that it works best for motivated students, Sometimes technology only works for motivated students. For the distracted and distractible, technology unfortunately offers a gateway to other worlds which have nothing to do with education. In contrast, paper and pencils can be used to doodle or write notes, but doodles have a much more benign effect on learning than YouTube videos, despite that occasional middle-school penis that gets scribbled on papers or desks.

Providing fewer temptations would be a kindness for those kids who are struggling to stay in the academic game. I am not advocating doing away with the laptops. But radical cutbacks might be the best move U.S. education has made in the last few decades.

Any of your staff meetings leave you feeling like this?

The best thing about retirement is a sense of “done.” Done has a feel. Done has a texture. The cake is baked. Any zombies have been dismembered and burned. Done is not exactly burnt out – I still enjoy substitute teaching – but done means I can read in peace. I can write silly haikus about cooking shows or throw toffee on top of chocolate pudding pies. I can ignore the news freely and immerse myself in television shows I missed while grading, making spreadsheets, and trying to dig myself out of scary pedagogical corners. If I don’t tap the button that commits me to cover for another teacher, I can read through the middle of the night. I can turn off all the alarms.

I recommend life as a retired teacher. I recommend it especially to those working in urban and disadvantaged areas who are under constant pressure to hit impossible targets. On the one to ten scale, how stressed are you? That stress is not benign. Year after year of trying to do six impossible things before breakfast can leave you broken. Cardiovascular disease and PTSD happen even to teachers with fitness regimes.

Seriously, reader. On that one to ten scale, where are you? Are you getting near a natural breakpoint? Maybe you should find out where you stand in your state’s retirement scheme. Those later-life dollars often prove more vital than we expect, so I want to emphasize financial prudence here, but you also want to be in position to enjoy yourself when you move on to the next life-stage.

Looking back, I know I never minded the hard work I brought home, night after night, week-end after week-end. To those nonteacher readers who think teaching is an easy eight to three job with summers off, I’d like to say that someone grades all those math papers. When I did my student teaching, I discovered my cooperating teacher often stayed at her high school until 6:30 or later to get through the day’s papers. Grades must be entered in grading programs. Parent calls must be made. Emails must be answered. Meetings must be attended — before school, during school and after school. Assignments must be set up and sometimes printed. When still allowed, lessons must be planned, usually multiple versions for differing groups of students. Teachers can’t give the exact same lesson to one kid who is at grade level and another kid four years below grade level.

There’s a critical snippet of a line in the above paragraph: “When still allowed…” I kept going when my administration told me I had to give seventh-grade Common Core materials to my math classes, even though those classes were testing at an average third-grade level. I kept tutoring, even on week-ends at a McDonalds near my school, over half an hour from my home. I kept trying, and trying, and trying. But at some point, I changed. After years of telling myself, “You can do it!”, I found myself saying, “I can’t do this.” I would self-correct immediately at first. “I can too do it.” But I knew I did not believe myself.

I did not mind the work. But I did mind working stupid. My kids needed remediation that I was never allowed to provide in school and I could only get some of them to get up to get their Saturday breakfast tacos and math practice.

Eduhonesty: Are you being treated well, fellow teacher? All those hours, all that emotional investment in doing your best and doing the right thing? Do you feel appreciated? How are your self-messages sounding? Can you still say, “I can do it!” with confidence?

If your messages are beginning to sound shaky, if “can do” is being replaced with “can’t do” or even “It’s no use” or “Oh, man, what did I do this time?” – then maybe it’s time for a change. The exodus has already begun. According to the Wall Street Journal, in “the first 10 months of 2018, public educators quit at … the highest rate for public educators since such records began in 2001” — a number that translates to one million workers quitting public-education positions in 2018 according to Labor Department data. (Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/teachers-quit-jobs-at-highest-rate-on-record-11545993052, Hackman and Morath)

I regret writing this post in some ways. Many of the teachers I know who recently retired or left the field were among the best teachers I knew – creative, engaged, and knowledgeable, with terrific classroom management skills. The tally of gifted, former educators who are now selling make-up and feminine care products ought to shake this country to its core.

But the economy has been on a roll. It’s an absolutely great time to be looking for a job. That includes a different teaching position if you love your work but don’t feel the love coming back from above. Those now-former educators leaving the field are peppering the internet with online vacancies.

If you are an older teacher who regularly feels unappreciated or even under threat, and if you are at a good break point in your state retirement plan, I recommend the smartest move I made all during that last, crazy year: I turned in the necessary forms to the state and I quit.

I didn’t sleep well last night, but that doesn’t matter. I made a delicious lactose-free, 1% latte, cut a sizable piece of pumpkin pie and sat down to my computers. I plan to join a friend for lunch at The Cracker Barrel. I’ll go to a book club later this week, not the one that I started. I will pull out the yarn for another crocheting project, my fourth or fifth, depending on whether wearability counts. I believe I am ready to graduate from scarves to a more complex shape than the classic rectangle. If all else fails, a monster Star Trek puzzle waits for me in the basement. I have been planning to get back to that puzzle for months now.

If your stress level is approaching ten then, please, reader, do yourself a huge favor: PUT YOURSELF FIRST FOR A CHANGE. Only you can decide if putting yourself first means changing employment or locations, or even retiring. I would like to encourage my stressed readers to take an afternoon or a day to make a “T” chart or a larger life map to explore the possibility of moving on. You are always one decision away from changing your life. Is it time for a change?

Tougher standards have become reformers’ latest strategy to close the U.S. achievement gap. Why can’t Ginger read? We did not give her big chapter books soon enough!

I am sure one appeal of the standards movement is that it offers a simple fix for a simple problem. The fact that our simple problem may be a grossly oversimplified problem in disguise is ignored. Given the enormous costs and efforts involved in shifting classroom content, though, standards proponents should have explored one more question in depth before they leapt into the Common Core: What if we are wrong and the achievement gap only peripherally relates to classroom content?

Because if content is not central to the achievement gap then, damn! We have wasted so much money and so much time. So many bodies are looking under the streetlight on the wrong block. I am afraid that may be exactly what the standards reform movement has done.

Why do I believe more rigorous standards will not rescue us? Schools operated under their own state standards before the Common Core forced Illinois and other states to rework their many, previously-defined expectations. While going into detail about previous standards would require reams of pages filled with tiny details, I can skip those details and assert at least one fact: The old Illinois standards graduated both students ready to enter the best universities in the world, and students who couldn’t fill out an employment application or calculate a 20% tip.

Eduhonesty: I expect the same learning disparity to unfold under the Common Core, even in those states that have backed away from the Core. The standards movement and those Core–adapted standards remain. The huge gap in background knowledge and academic aptitude between students remains. Our test scores keep documenting this fact and we are nearly a decade into the Common Core experiment.

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