One problem with discussions on the US educational system is the inherent breadth of the issues. It’s easy to mire down in multiple topics and lose focus. Sunday morning, I joined readers to discuss my book, “Fighting the White Knight: Saving Education from Misguided Testing, Inappropriate Standards and other Good Intentions.” We had a diverse group: people with no experience in education, a paraprofessional from a wealthy district, an urban charter teacher’s spouse, a retired teacher from another wealthy district, a university professor, and me.

I’d like to share one point from this morning that deserves much more attention than it has received.

Eduhonesty: As educators know, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) explicitly planned to evaluate US schools through expanded testing, designed to gain additional data on student progress. The Common Core set out to create a common national curriculum, and associated national test. That test was intended to homogenize data across the country.

Illinois provides a frightening example of what actually happened when various government entities used power and money to push NCLB and the Core on US students.

In Illinois, we abruptly threw all bilingual and special education students into the state testing pool, mostly dropping tests those subgroups had taken previously, but sometimes adding extra tests and thus subtracting instructional time. Over time, we changed the Illinois State Achievement Test (ISAT) into the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) to match new Core expectations. Then we changed PARCC into the Illinois Assessment of Readiness (IAR), because our PARCC scores pleased almost no one, except maybe a few vindictive psychopaths. Fierce arguments about changes to the IAR are currently underway. Some factions want to break the test into three parts. If this is done, the new IAR definitely will not be the IAR of the recent past.

Here’s the topic that never gets discussed, probably because there is nothing to be done: If we had left that first test, the ISAT, in place instead of playing test roulette, we would know a great deal more about student progress than we do now. When test administration and test content change significantly, the ability to make comparisons over time becomes lost. How does student achievement in 2024 compare to achievement in 2004, 2010 or 2020? Honestly, we don’t know. Answers to that question can be inferred, but the students of today are not taking anything close to the same test given to students in 2004. If 2024 students took the same algebra test as students from 2004, stakeholders could quickly say, “score are down 12%” and reliable, valid data would support that number. But despite burying ourselves in numbers, that reliable, valid data does not exist.

And the money that funded those national curricula, tests, and related professional developments and committee meetings, not to mention the money spent on purchases of test-related classroom materials? That money could probably have funded a permanent base on the moon. I honestly believe we might have spent enough $$$$$ to build a lunar colony — and sadly, if we had spent the money on the moon, and had left education alone, I believe today’s students would have come out academically, socially and emotionally ahead.

Recent reforms have provided yet another example of that old quote from the Viet Nam war: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Except the village remains ravished and wrecked in pockets throughout the country, and it’s unclear who — if anyone — we saved.

P.S. Yes, we do have comparable data from a national test. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a standardized test measuring academic performance given by the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. This test is only for students in grades 4, 8 and 12, however, and students do not receive test results.

How often do we need to repeat the material?

Until they get it.

And we need to be 100% clear — If we move on before students understand, there’s a real chance no one will fill in missing knowledge later. As curricula keep getting more demanding due to districts’ struggles to hit test targets, repeating material becomes more problematic. After curriculum planners put 192 days worth of material into the plans for a 180 day school year, often they can’t add in another whack at finding the area of a hexagon. With curricula stumbling clumsily over one another, maybe the hexagons will disappear. Maybe telling time will be left to a future person whose school’s curriculum has dropped the clocks that used to be taught in the next grade.

Eduhonesty: The risk of putting too much material into the curriculum and then going too fast is huge. Because if we “taught the material” but they “did not get it” — we taught NOTHING, all the while wasting our students time.

Why districts should hire extra help for small group interventions:

Without extra bodies in the picture,

The math’s wrong.

A fixed number of

teachers cannot do small

group interventions

without leaving other

kids rudderless,

teacherless, killing time

by default.

I stumbled upon this while deleting pictures. I paused. It’s not the first such note I ever confiscated, and almost certainly not the last. As we keep trying to create assembly-line models of education, though, I think we should take a moment to remember what it feels like to be thirteen.

Middle schools and high schools are filled with adolescents whose brains are sometimes frozen, mental stutters, wholly stuck on a kid sitting across the room — and oblivious to the woman talking in front of the whiteboard.

These are adolescents.

And they need more than an endless stream of math and English factoids that are expected to be part of the latest year’s spring test. They need adults to understand that children and adolescents are not small versions of adults. Small humans are not simply humans who know fewer facts. They do not struggle to make sound choices because of lack of data.

They struggle because their brains and bodies are changing so rapidly that confusion is often where they live, not merely a way station on the way to adulthood.

Can we save education from today’s onslaught of misguided testing and inappropriate — sometimes even ridiculous — standards? What about the other codified and uncodified good intentions that keep upending our classrooms? That subtitle above is a mouthful and it doesn’t even explicitly capture my chapter on the student loan debacle.

My recently published book can easily be found by putting “Fighting the White Knight Jocelyn Turner” into a search engine. That single act awes me a little. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and so many little bookstores and unfamiliar websites seem to have my book. Poshmark even lists a couple of copies.

Reader, I would be so happy if you would order my book. Kindle and ebook copies are available. I hope for kind reviews, although I also expect to get slammed by some readers. I am calling the current system broken, while demanding that we increase educational time and funding to cover remedial education. I want a longer school year in some places, as well as more consideration for “old-fashioned” educational approaches that do work when appropriately applied.

The system has to change. Piecemeal fixes and occasional grants have not been narrowing the achievement gap. I expected the post-COVID gap to widen significantly, and the data has been bearing me out. A reading and math disaster has been underway, and reading is the foundation upon which all educational success ultimately rests. That disaster unsurprisingly kicked the kids hardest who were already down.

To quote from https://hechingerreport.org/massive-learning-setbacks-show-covids-sweeping-toll-on-kids/:

“… the average student lost more than half a school year of learning in math and nearly a quarter of a school year in reading – with some district averages slipping by more than double those amounts, or worse. Online learning played a major role, but students lost significant ground even where they returned quickly to schoolhouses, especially in math scores in low-income communities.

When you have a massive crisis, the worst effects end up being felt by the people with the least resources,” said Stanford education professor Sean Reardon, who compiled and analyzed the data along with Harvard economist Thomas Kane.*

Yes, the US educational system works wonderfully in many lucky locations. I live in a district that sometimes makes national news because of its first-rate schools. We lost ground to COVID locally, but comparatively came out not too badly damaged — and my neighbors have a long history of hiring expensive tutors to fill in learning gaps.

But I worked elsewhere. I have seen the effect of property-tax-based school funding in areas where houses are cheap and industry scarce. I have seen what happens when remediation does not happen; children who are lost become more lost because bodies and hours needed to fill in past learning gaps simply don’t exist. Those districts with more money can hire more paraprofessionals, but our least financially endowed districts may even struggle to buy enough paper. Parents who are struggling to make the rent because of rising food costs are not hiring tutors or checking out Kumon classes.

So I wrote a book. I am cleaning up a second book right now, one that helps explain in detail how No Child Left Behind and the Common Core failed to bring us out of today’s harsh, luck-of-the-zipcode landscape. I promise readers that “Fighting the White Knight” contains a great deal of food for thought.

Join me in my journey?

Social media sites where I can be found:

• pinterest.com/jocelyntheplaid (2 education sections and some fine iced coffee recipes, etc.)
• facebook.com/jocelyn.turner.75
• instagram.com/shastatheplaid (mostly watercolors)
• biographyjar.com (just for fun — education has only bled into the fabric on occasion)
• I am almost nonexistent on the former Twitter now, but I may rejoin the group when the dust settles, if enough of the old crowd are still there.

*https://hechingerreport.org/massive-learning-setbacks-show-covids-sweeping-toll-on-kids/

A few interesting pre-COVID observations:

In 2019, a full 10.4% of students in public schools were English learners according to EducationWeek — more than 1 in 10 kids. No matter where anyone stands on immigration, that’s a formidable number of kids who required robust, targeted, language-learning support within our schools. This large chunk of our student population should have been receiving support in the form of afterschool and week-end programs, not to mention summer school — effectively requiring a longer school year.

Our distribution of English learners has not been not falling evenly across US schools. According to Education Week, 64% of teachers in the 2017-2018 school year had at least one English learner in their classrooms. If we flip this on its head, that means, 36% — or more than one in three teachers — did not have any English learners.

(From an EducationWeek quiz sponsored by Lexia Learning that popped into my email.)

I don’t entirely agree with the quiz and current writings on the subject of how to help language learners: in particular, these students don’t need access to grade-level texts! I strongly believe part of our struggle to manage bilingual education comes from unrealistic, good intentions — all the kids who are receiving unreadable texts in a scenario where they don’t begin to have the time necessary to conquer the challenge we have thrown at them. Some of these texts are not mountains — they are moon launches.

But common misconceptions mentioned in the quiz email are real:

Yes, our bilingual students are often assumed to be unintelligent because of their language struggles.

Yes, parents and others may believe that EL services take away learning opportunities from non-EL peers. Especially in financially disadvantaged neighborhoods, this may even be true: when there is a finite pool of money and it’s not enough from the outset, any and every program in a sense is taking money away from other programs. In a meagerly-funded school district, not all of those cheated programs will be fluff or “extra” opportunities.

Eduhonesty: And then COVID arrived and many areas went to virtual learning. The net result appears to have been a decline in English learning, especially in younger grades — a true concern since data has been documenting academic stagnation in students who become long-term participants in English-learning programs.

Still, the meaning of the downward trend in language learning growth suggested by aggregate student data from 2021 — at least compared to 2020 and 2019 — cannot be honestly quantified. Testing windows changed and many students skipped testing entirely, leading to “concerns among state education agencies that the most vulnerable English-learners weren’t tested, said Amaya Garcia, deputy director of preK-12 education at the think tank New America.” The test population changed at the same time groups of students received different amounts of test preparation than had historically been expected.

Tests showed “relatively larger declines in speaking, according to WIDA’s report, and in 1st and 6th grades… with “more declines in language growth in the younger years,” concerning “since there’s the hope that children will become proficient early enough to exit out of an English-learner program by 4th grade to avoid the risk of becoming a long-term English-learner, who may end up stagnated academically.”

See “The Complicated Picture of English-Language Learners’ Progress During the Pandemic.”*

Eduhonesty: Even if the numbers are fuzzy, that learning loss is real. You don’t need a meteorologist to see which way the wind blows. Students who spent months isolated from the outside world lost the opportunity to practice speaking with English-speaking peers. Students in houses with limited technology, or new, late-arriving, unfamiliar technology, lost ground when compared to students who already had all the tech, not to mention parents who found zooming and its equivalents effortless.

Do we honestly want to tackle the COVID damage to English-learning? If we do, I suggest we must extend the school year for those students who fell behind. When everyone goes to school for about 180 days, the kids who are already ahead naturally get further ahead. Previous learning is the platform upon which we build today’s learning — and the kids who already have larger vocabularies and more background knowledge can learn faster than less fortunate counterparts. Vocabulary is a source of learning as well as a result of learning. We must make certain that students receive the opportunity to learn the words they missed — and have been missing — as our schools barrel forward, teaching standards that only sometimes fit the students within US classrooms.

P.S. Yes, it may be racist to demand that every EL become ‘proficient’ in English — although I’ll observe that any education for our ELs that does not target the acquisition of English language vocabulary must be considered equally or more racist. English remains far and away the primary business language of this country. Adults with a limited English-language vocabulary too often end up condemned to lower-paying jobs in backrooms in the service sector, or worse.

A memory: My student’s mom had a job putting a small part inside another small part in a factory. She did not know what she was making. She just endlessly, hour after hour, stuck one part inside another. We talked about how she wanted to improve her English in hopes of getting “a job on the floor” — a job with benefits, in other words, real paychecks, and even air-conditioning. I hope she got there. But those backrooms without air conditioning and those 29-hour-a-week jobs that keep a person right below the hours needed to qualify for healthcare benefits? Those backrooms and 29-hour jobs are everywhere in the US.

Email from education Week on 3/16/23. titled Quiz|Supporting English Language Learners

*https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/the-complicated-picture-of-english-language-learners-progress-during-the-pandemic/2021/11#:~:text=What%20do%20we%20know%20from,of%20the%20four%20language%20domains. By Ileana Najarro — November 02, 2021 | Corrected: November 03, 2021

I believe I have an especially savvy group of readers. I don’t think my readers require much in the way of classroom management advice. But it’s September and some of you are newbies — in a time when fashions sometimes cram all of us together into overcrowded lifeboats. So I thought I’d run a small stream of useful observations:

Larger class projects heavily favor the self- and grade-motivated. Sometimes these students effectively take over the whole project, directing struggling students to paste shiny stars or glitter on backboards, or write a simple section that the self- and grade-motivated student then almost entirely rewrites.

My own thoughts: If you can’t do a project mostly in class where you can watch group dynamics unfold, I’d avoid that project. I’d also create related assignments to ensure that weaker or less-motivated members can’t simply hand all the hard work to fellow student “Frankie”– who really, really wants that “A” and is perfectly willing to do ALL the work if that’s what the “A” demands. Frankie probably does not care if fellow group members learn the actual content the project teaches.

Eduhonesty observation: EVEN WITH STRONG SUPERVISION, group projects mostly favor the students who least require extra help and remedial education.

Desmond’s arguments are heavily based in issues of ACCESS. For example, what if a person must pay rent because they cannot qualify for a mortgage? What happens if “payday loans” are the only way to make the month’s rent payment? Or if there is no possible way to make that rent payment?

Ironically, being unable to make the rent may be luckier than being able to get a “short-term” loan. Sometimes being forced to move may work out better than digging a deeper and deeper monthly financial hole. Payday loans are usually short-term loans, typically due on a person’s next payday, with variable fees and costs. These are expensive loans — especially for borrowers who cannot pay on the due date and must rollover their loan, adding interest and additional fees. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) found that “four out of five payday loans are rolled over or renewed within 14 days” — with “the majority of all payday loans … made to borrowers who renew their loans so many times that they end up paying more in fees than the amount of money they originally borrowed.” *

At a certain level of financial comfort, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that basic comfort is about access — access to funds, access to safe housing, healthy food, transportation, support services, technology, and all the small pieces that come together to shape a life and lifestyle. Access has become one of the invisible elephants in the room with us because millions of financially comfortable people in the United States never lack access. When their smart watch or laptop fails, they stop at Costco on the way to Whole Foods, gassing up their Toyota SUV while wondering if they should buy a Tesla instead.

Where does education fit into this picture? I would argue Desmond’s bifurcation permeates US schools. Poverty-tax based school funding creates a natural, inescapable bifurcation. In the interest of not writing another book, I won’t go into the many factors that contributed to the widening of the achievement gap during the pandemic — except to say I absolutely saw it coming, having lived in a district with flat screen TVs in the student lounge, with iPads, laptops, and other technology scattered across kitchens and bedrooms in my neighbor’s homes. Going virtual turned out to be fairly easy in my home district.

In underfunded districts, the road to virtual often proved tortuous and cripplingly slow. One case familiar to me: Chromebooks ordered from China did not arrive during September due to the unexpected, dramatic surge in demand for laptops. Essential technology arrived over a month late, pushed into many homes unfamiliar with that technology. Throughout the United States, urgently needed tech not in place before the pandemic remained unavailable for weeks or longer, even when districts sourced the necessary funds. New tech — like toilet paper — flew off the shelves to lucky schools who found money and cranked out purchase orders quickly enough, but much of that tech ended up on backorder. Even when the laptops finally arrived, students who were mostly unfamiliar with their new machines struggled to join online learning communities.

ACCESS — the difference between the kids with their own laptops and phones, and the kids who had been going to the computer lab at school twice a week.

The pandemic highlighted the issue of access, creating a dramatic moment in time, but that issue existed before any coronavirus swept the world. Before COVID, we had middle school and high school kids hanging out in fast food parking lots to gain access to the internet so they could complete school assignments. We had kids using their parents’ phones to get information for web search assignments. We had kids walking through unsafe neighborhoods to get to libraries to use techology that was never going to be inside their own bedrooms — kids who felt lucky to even have a bedroom, since past experience had shown them that a warm, safe place to sleep could not always be relied upon. From the USA Department of Education: “In the 2020–2021 school year, around 1.1 million public school students, or 2.2% of all enrolled students, were identified as experiencing homelessness.” **

The actual definition of homelessness can be tricky and homelessness often comes and goes. But without nitpicking on numbers, it’s worth stopping to think about childhood bedrooms. Bedrooms can change quickly. They can also disappear.

Eduhonesty: We will never fix the achievement gap until and unless we equalize access to education. Inequitable school funding necessarily results in inequitable educational access. Any cure for our bifurcated US education system demands that we look at access — access to tech, the written word, teachers, and supportive paraprofessionals, as well as access to reasonable class sizes, tutoring, a safe learning environment, and necessary remedial education, among other concerns which affect learning.

Equitable funding will not be equal funding. The fact is — financially disadvantaged districts don’t just need the same amount of money as the rich district up the road. To equalize access, those disadvantaged districts require more money. Property-tax based school funding works directly against educational justice, as funds get distributed based on neighborhood wealth, rather than a realistic assessment of the educational requirements of our children.

IF I WERE TO PICK A HILL TO DIE ON IN TODAY’S EDUCATIONAL REFORM EFFORTS, I WOULD CHOOSE THIS ONE: WE HAVE TO SCRAP THE CURRENT PROPERTY-TAX-BASED US SCHOOL FUNDING SYSTEM. This system guarantees inequitable access by definition. Those who have, get, and those who don’t are sometimes still sitting in fast food parking lots.

*https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-finds-four-out-of-five-payday-loans-are-rolled-over-or-renewed/

** https://nche.ed.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Student-Homelessness-in-America-2022.pdf

I recommend the book “Poverty by America” by Matthew Desmond.

The first quote that made me pause the book deserves to be shared: “A third of Americans live without much economic security working as bus drivers, farmers, teachers cashiers, cooks, nurses, security guards, social workers. Many are not officially counted among the poor but what then is the term for trying to raise two kids on $50,000 a year in Miami or Portland? What do you call it when you don’t qualify for a housing voucher but can’t get a mortgage either? When the rent takes half your paycheck and your student loan debt takes another quarter?… As a lived reality, there is plenty of poverty above the poverty line.”

What do you call it? I’d call it a reason to avoid certain careers. Or a reason to choose your location to teach with a tremendous amount of care. The range in teachers’ salaries is not nearly as wide as the range in housing prices from area to area. Teachers make an average starting salary of $35,766 in Iowa, with an overall average salary of $55,443.* Iowa has a Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI) of $211,054,** making it the seventh most affordable state for housing. In Oregon, that average starting teacher salary is $35,534 with an overall average of $61,631. The ZHVI for Oregon, however, is $498,558.

Teachers frequently fall into that category that Desmond laid out — poverty above the poverty line. The poverty line is an arbitrary line drawn by a ratio of resources to salary. Today’s current poverty threshold for an individual, according to healthcare.gov, is $14,580, a number that climbs to $30,000 for a family of four. In many parts of this country, teachers are among the working, not-quite-officially poor. Or they are avoiding falling into that category by commuting hours each day. You can work in San Francisco or Seattle. That doesn’t mean you can live there.

Eduhonesty: What do you call it when you can’t live where you work? When you can’t feed your own children on the money that you bring home? I’ll suggest readers journal the first answers to these questions that come to mind.

I’d call the above numbers a reason to organize, quit, change careers, or move. Those districts that don’t pay enough for teachers to afford housing or family vacations? They don’t deserve their teachers. We have entered the teacher shortage I predicted. That makes 2023 a great time to vote with your feet.

*Teacher Salaries in America, niche.com

**Zillow.com

The above question just screams teacher at me, especially as we flail away at the COVID gap. How is your health, teacher? How is your stress level? Do you think that stress level is going to improve?

I am going to assign what might be the first homework of a nearly 10-year-old blog. Write your best five paragraph essay explaining why your stress level is going to improve. What is about to change for the better? Then read what you wrote and ask yourself if you honestly believe your essay.

If you can’t write this essay because you don’t expect teaching life to improve, you may write an alternative essay. I’ll leave that topic more open. Perhaps, “how I am going to survive teaching?” Or “the long-term effects of stress on physical and mental health.” Yes, that sentence leads to a five pound book, not a five paragraph essay, but the essay will be a start. Maybe two essays, one on physical effects of stress and another on mental effects?

Eduhonesty: Too many of us act like we get to walk away from our choices in the long-run — and sometimes we do. But I lost a friend this week. Her choices caught up with her in the form of a massive stroke, just as she reached the traditional retirement age.

This post is not for the many teachers who love their positions, the teachers with helpful, supportive administrations, and a clear sense of fulfillment in their calling. You all rock and obviously your check engine light is probably fine, or at least unaffected by your work.

But if daily work stress feels overwhelming — for whatever reason — stop the car! Pull off to the side of the road. Take this summer to find a better position in a more supportive school. Or even make a huge leap and find an alternative vocation. Go back to school to change careers if you have to. Summer is your chance to reset your light and your life. Don’t let the summer of ’23 slip away.

Please share this with struggling colleagues. Hugs to all my readers,

Jocelyn Turner