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The presenter for the Charlotte Danielson Group, a tall, capable and engaging former principal, woke me up briefly at Danielson professional development (PD) meeting #57 (or so) as she reached out to her audience. I wrote down her words on a blue Post-It note.

“Anyone who feels you’re overwhelmed, you are in the right spot. That’s the nature of teaching,” she said.

Eduhonesty: Danielson’s presenter knows her material and she knows teaching. I found myself participating in a zero-interest PD, scrawling ideas on poster paper and talking to “elbow partners” and small group members about implementing Danielson’s framework. I wonder how that presenter would have behaved if she had known, as she coached us cheerily through that PD, that a number of attendees had just been purged from the district. She was speaking to the walking dead, people who had been told the day before that they no longer worked for the district, the result of a deal between the district and the state I have been told. I have not confirmed the latter, but I would not be surprised. We are a district at the end of No Child Left Behind failures, subject to sanctions that include even firing the whole teaching staff of the district.

The presenter was right about that overwhelmed part. I kept scanning the room, looking at lost and lonely faces, the teachers who were obediently killing time before they went off to look for new positions over Spring Break. Some faces were absent, of course. Not all the walking dead decided to sit through another bout of Danielson. In spare minutes, colleagues talked to me indignantly about their lost jobs. I’m not going to go into details at the moment, but I felt truly angry for some of my young colleagues, many of whom were feeling angry for their fallen comrades. Still, one advantage of age has to be a sense of perspective. In this context, losing a job may be a piece of extremely good luck. After all, this is the humane and sensitive district that fired a large chunk of its teaching staff right before a required PD about the evaluation system used to push those same staff members out, and then expected those non-renewed teachers to attend that evaluation PD, before sending them off to enjoy their spring break.

Overwhelmed? Oh, yeah.

And the scary part may be that the Danielson presenter could be right: This may simply be the nature of teaching in an academically-disadvantaged school district in these times.

“The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the
man who can’t read them.”
~ Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)

I was talking to a colleague last night. We discussed a topic that slips away in all the noise, the cacophony of voices trying to raise America’s test scores.

Al fin y al cabo, at the end of the day, educational success comes down to reading. Can you read? If you can’t, you can’t succeed. Period. If you can read, you may succeed. Behavioral issues can prevent readers from doing well in school. Even then, though, some of those readers come back from their educational graveyards, recovering from the 1.25 cumulative average on their high school report cards. Our success stories who go back to community colleges after a few years flipping burgers? They manage to clamber up the educational success ladder because, at the end of the day, they can read their text books and they finally understand the value in reading those books.

Eduhonesty: We are implementing so many interventions everywhere in our lower-scoring schools. The interventions we need have names like System 44 and Read 180. If a student can’t read by middle school, that student ought to be pulled out of all regular courses except mathematics and gym — they don’t get nearly enough exercise now — and put into classes designed to teach reading. If we give our students the gift of reading, they will be able to find all the content they want for themselves. If we give them content without reading skills, most of that content will fade into the mists of time, irretrievable once the teachers are gone.

We have professional development tomorrow. We are supposed to spend the day learning about our evaluation system and the Charlotte Danielson Rubric. I need to charge my laptop so I can pretend to care. Almost all developments have been on this rubric for the last few years. I am also supposed to have read her book, but I lent the book to a colleague who has misplaced his copy. In some distant past, I imagine I read the required chapters. I’ll find out tomorrow.

Eduhonesty: Our halls are pockmarked with first year teachers in my school. We are a young faculty. I understand the rationale behind endless Danielson; the rubric assesses good teaching and hammering us with Danielson should result in teachers who learn to follow the rubric and thus become good teachers. But classroom management consists of myriad tiny details. It’s only peripherally an exercise in the big picture. The big picture won’t help me if my students aren’t in their seats and can never find their paper and pencils.

Again, I confront what I regard as the educational blind spot of our time. I am not saying more Danielson is bad. The Danielson Rubric has many good points. The problem with teaching, reteaching and then reteaching Danielson, before starting the year with yet more Danielson, is the opportunity cost. What else might we be teaching our new teachers? What is the problem with testing, testing and testing? Among multiple concerns, I’d put opportunity cost near the top. What could students be learning if we were instructing them rather than testing them?

Time allocation is the invisible elephant in the room with us, the elephant that nobody sees, probably because nobody has time to look. We are too busy trying to implement the many great plans of the too many administrators who are acting like the blind men as they scurry around the room with the elephant. To any readers who don’t know the parable of the blind men and the elephant, I recommend looking up this story. It’s a perfect parable for education in our time.

Husband: “They have another test?”
Me: “A bubble test. They’re not ready either.”
Husband: “How can they be? All they ever do is take tests.”
Me: “I have to give it. Everybody does. It’s required. Most of them will fail this one too.”
Husband: “I never experienced it, but I can imagine how that feels, failing all of the time. I’d want to get out of school as fast as I could.”

Eduhonesty: I’d say my spouse nailed it in a few short sentences. These kids are on a rollercoaster of nonstop failures and, at this rate, I expect kids at the bottom to opt out of school as soon as they are allowed to do so. I sure would.

I am so tired of giving inappropriate tests for which my class is not ready. Please don’t misunderstand. I am teaching as fast as I can. I am tutoring at odd hours and on the weekend. I don’t control the material I am required to present, however, and I don’t write the tests that I am required to give pretty much on schedule. The whole grade has been put on this schedule — special education, bilingual, and regular classes alike. But the truth is that when a student enters a math class at a third grade level (true for all but one student in one of my classes) then seventh grade math is going to clobber that student. We are giving my students seventh grade math. Many of them are going down for the count and I don’t know how much longer they are going to try to get up.

I need to observe that a few kids are hanging in with me, those who come to tutoring and those who have some knack for mathematics. But the majority are lost. The majority need to be led, hands held through every step of processes that remain baffling at path’s end. We are told to differentiate. There is no differentiation that can make 3(2x + 4) + 5x -5 = 180 intelligible to a kid that does not understand 5(x +2). We need to go back, and pretty far back, to lay foundations for these kids.

True differentiation requires meeting students where they are at, moving them into the next level above their understanding, but no time has been allotted for this remedial work other than scattered tutoring hours. Testing hours are also taking a great deal of regular classroom time that becomes unavailable for instruction. In many cases, that compromised instruction and those tutoring hours might as well be band-aids on third-degree burns.

They’re lost, I’m exhausted, and this is stupid. Enough said.

We are not actually past PARCC but we have finished the first round. Round two will come at us this spring. The school has not yet finished, but my grade wrapped up PARCC for now. Today was the return to “normalcy.”

We had a rocky landing. Students wanted to continue coloring. They had been allowed to color for hours the week before since no talking was allowed until all students were done with a test section. Coloring had continued after sections’ ends since no academics were planned on test days, the rationale being that we want students at their most rested and alert. Everyone wanted to finish decorating pages they had started or wanted a turn coloring like other, faster test-takers.

While last week was intense, students also had a lot of time off. They came back to bell-to-bell instruction and they did not go into the stockyard chute quietly. They roamed the room. They threw paperwads at the waste basket. They asked for “free” time. They took forever to settle into their seats and begin work. I had to start three sets of disciplinary paperwork, a rarity in my life.

Eduhonesty: I can’t count this in my tally of testing days, but I don’t want to ignore today’s rambunctious behavior either. The day was damaged, a fair amount of instructional time compromised, and I blame today’s loss of learning on the disruption to our routine created by the PARCC test. I’m sure other factors are in play. We are near spring break. It’s a short week. Some students have low grades and have just realized that it’s too late to pull out of any academic nosedive.

But I believe today would have been far calmer and more productive if not for the break in our routine created by this latest bout of standardized testing. Students often end tests like PARCC feeling lost, sad, depressed, angry or simply edgy, the last a result of sitting for hours at a desk, churning out flight-or-fight hormones in response to the threat that test represents. These students are not receptive to learning new material. Like their teachers, I’m pretty sure some of them just want to crawl under the covers and hide. One of my students signed his paper “Lil Davy” today and I looked that “Lil” that he’d stuck in front of his name and hurt for him a bit. I’ve never seen him call himself that before. I’m sure he wants to retreat into the past, a past where tests didn’t attack all the time and sometimes you got to pick up your crayons and coloring book.

I am genuinely sorry that tomorrow I am supposed to give Davy and his classmates another required bubble test for which I know they are not ready. I have to give the test. All the math teachers in my grade are supposed to give an identical test, including the special education teacher. Damn, I hate these tests.

The assignment involved creating an animal and its habitat. Here’s an exact quote: “They live in the Southern Asia of Africa in the Middle East.”

Ummm… I’ll say this much for the habitat: You could put any climatic conditions you wanted in this mythical land. The climate chosen was fine. The location made me laugh, at least.

Eduhonesty: Geography is disappearing from the curriculum, in part because it conveys no benefit on standardized tests. We still teach the state’s capitols, but that’s about it. We need to realize, though, that Americans who grow up with this little understanding of the world are going to look unbelievably foolish when and if they exit America’s borders. Our best bet will be to hope they stay home.

I spent a few, confused days in Portugal once. As I was watching my bilingual students take the PARCC test, my thoughts flitted back to that driving tour of the Iberian Peninsula. As I toured the classroom, proctoring, I thought of my experience with the Portuguese language. Written Portuguese saved me; I had studied French and Spanish. Portuguese is an amalgam of these two languages with quirky accents and a few other Latin irregularities. I can mostly figure out written Portuguese. On the other hand, when people talked at me, I immediately became lost. The idea that struck me, though, was that I was probably more competent in written Portuguese than a number of my bilingual students — maybe even most of my bilingual students — are in English. They blasted through sections of that test simply because they could not read the test. When I asked “Micky,” one of my students, about the PARCC test during a later tutoring session, he said: “I didn’t know any of the answers so I just wrote things.”

He laughed. That laugh had the sound of resilience. Some students get clobbered by these standardized tests, tests that are pitched years above their learning levels. Others detach, like Micky.

Eduhonesty: I’m glad I don’t have to grade the PARCC. I can’t even imagine what some of those graders think. I wish I did not have to give the PARCC, at least not to everyone in my classes. For some students, that test makes no sense at all — either for them or to them. We need a better testing system, one that takes into account a student’s academic mastery. We will learn much more from data from questions that our students actually attempt to answer. Micky’s data is useless; I guarantee it.

I am about to recover some earlier posts on an evaluation. Apparently, all is now well. What does that mean exactly? It means the math mistake that put my colleague in remediation with the possibility of being fired has now been corrected. She no longer needs remediation. I suggest reading the earlier posts from March 3rd and 5th on this topic.

Eduhonesty: Teachers, has your evaluation been determined by a mathematical formula using multiple inputs? Are you unhappy with your final average? Check the math. The people who screwed up my paycheck at least twice this year and my days off at least once may well be the same people who determined my final average for my evaluation. I have not checked my average. I surely would not bet my future on this number, though.

I know at least one teacher whose number was not merely wrong — it was frighteningly wrong. If my colleague had not squawked, that number would still be wrong. She would be in needless remediation.

To any undervalued teachers out there: Check the math. In Illinois, at least some evaluations from the Charlotte Danielson rubric are running over twenty pages. That’s a lot of room to slip a digit somewhere. That’s a lot of mathematics that can be undone by one or more simple typos. Santa may check his list twice, but I would not trust my school district to check anything twice. Or to check anything at all.

I have been killing time, watching my students backs as they stare at the tiny print on Chromebook screens. That print looks very small. In the economically disadvantaged area where I work, the size of the print may be a problem. I had to read my “seal code” numbers aloud as I wrote them on the board. “Seal codes” are special sets of digits that unlock a section of the new PARCC test, a coded version of those paper strips that students had to break to enter new sections on the old paper tests. Not all of my students could read my seal codes, despite the fact I wrote them in bright, red ink in something like font size 395.

Poor students can get an annual pair of glasses but girls, in particular, may choose not to wear these. Could all my students read those little letters? Not easily or not well, I am sure. I am the mom of a bat-blind girl who got contacts at an early age, as well as frequent eye exams, but these students are not so lucky. I have been fighting the need to adapt the seating chart for students who can’t see since the start of the year. Despite multiple calls home to suggest glasses, a number of my students must sit in front to see.

Will vision affect the PARCC test? That’s my question. We may know more when test results trickle back in a few months, but then again, if that test proves to be as hard it looked from my proctoring glances, I don’t think we are going to learn much about what my students actually know. I think they are going to get annihilated. Sadly, I believe a small part of the damage done may result from teensy letters on teensy screens in a techno-challenged environment.

Eduhonesty: How we could sort out losses from poor eyesight, as opposed to lack of academic understanding, I have no clue. The effort would be monumental and the benefit slight. We don’t have the resources to check, any more than some of our parents have the resources to provide those contact lenses that their daughters might be willing to wear.