An underexplored aspect of bilingual programs, worth putting out on the table again.

When I asked her if she was a bilingual student…

In many parts of America, in meeting after meeting after meeting, all across the nation, districts are figuring out how to implement new harder, Common Core or Common-Core based standards despite the fact that many students were unable to meet older standards their states were using before the Core. Why? How is this supposed to work?

In response to our students’ too-often-failing leaps as they tried to vault the test bar, governmental and educational leaders are choosing to deliberately elevate the bar, a strategy which makes no sense without additional resources, resources which I do not expect to become available. No one made extra resources available to help schools under NCLB, not in any meaningful fashion. No one helped with RtI. No one supplied substitute teachers while six teachers in my school left the building to brainstorm for Rising Star, an Illinois, NCLB-inspired improvement plan. In these challenging economic times, while a few districts may be lucky enough to be given extra government grants, most of our urban and financially-disadvantaged schools are scrambling to find money to fix broken technology, repair ancient plumbing, buy paper and hire teachers and teaching assistants. We have no extra money. Who will help us? Who will help our students to hit these tougher standards? We were often sweating blood in our attempts to meet previous standards.

Many financially-challenged districts today are using what scarce resources those districts can free up to buy new Common Core-aligned books and software right now. When the U.S. government pushed the adoption of a new, altered curriculum, that curriculum opened up a tremendous money-making opportunity for publishing companies. Schools are replacing as many textbooks as they can afford, buying new materials “aligned” to the Common Core. Districts want the book that has been written to maximize scores on new Core-aligned state tests.

How is this helping students?

Eduhonesty: I am in no way against standards. But the staggering opportunity costs created by new standards deserve to be out front and on the table. As we pay for new books, software, supplies, professional development, and curriculum committee meetings, we ought to be looking at our costs in terms of the gains we can expect to see.

My question: If NCLB did not work — and no documentation suggests it did — then why do we expect new, more demanding standards to work? With Draconian threats for districts that failed to hit targets, NCLB demanded improvements. Those improvements did not materialize. Why will new standards work? How will new standards work?

With more money for more tutoring and longer school years, I could see the standards improving education. But without that $$, all I see are more confusion and higher opportunity costs coming at us.

(This is being reprinted as I work on a book, but this advice could be helpful to many teachers. Readers, please pass this post along to fellow teachers who may benefit — teachers in struggling districts with high turnover rates.)

My eldest girl is busy planning her lessons for next year. I am not. I would plan my lessons but every single year of my last four years, I have found myself teaching different grades and/or subjects. I suspect I will teach 8th grade language arts and social studies, but I can’t be sure.

This is a subtle cost to being part of a poor district that sees constant personnel changes. I won’t do a lot of work before fall because for all I know I’ll end up teaching 7th grade science and math instead of the English and social studies I taught this year. Two of four of last year’s bilingual teachers will be gone next year. (At four years, I am an old timer.) Who knows whose role I will fill next year? For all I know, I will be a resource teacher without a classroom.

P.S. Actually three of the four bilingual teachers were gone.

P.S.S. The following year, I left the district. The year after that I came back. At that point, nobody familiar was working in the bilingual department. They had all become strangers.

Eduhonesty: Be careful! I have known people to plan and prepare new materials all summer only to find out in August they have been transferred to another school and grade within their district. If you work in a district with high turnover, I recommend laying out your framework and timing, but after that let it go. Once you know your plan, stop. Daily materials can wait. Go swimming. Make ice cream sundaes. Play.

Too much can change between June and August.

My former Principal’s an exceptionally smart guy. I served on his Building Leadership Team a few years ago and I would say he picked his team well. I’m not sure any of us even minded the prospect of all that extra work we put in to prepare a plan for the state showing how we were going to raise school test scores.

Here’s the problem, though: All across America, school districts have been working furiously to bring up their test scores, running like desperate hamsters trapped in endlessly rotating wheels. Because we are running at top-speed, not nearly enough teachers and administrators on America’s school-improvement teams — or regular folk across the nation, for that matter — are asking critical questions: To what extent are the tests themselves and the scores themselves creating our problems? To what extent are the test-associated curricula themselves and increasingly difficult standards that create these curricula themselves creating our problems? To what extent are the tests and curricula themselves forcing the purchase of inappropriate materials? To what extent are those Common Core-adapted books themselves adding to our problems?

Too few people are asking whether raising test scores is the best or right strategy. We are told higher test scores are necessary to prepare students for college. We are told all students must be made college-ready. What if we are wrong?

I am reminded of the joke about the man looking for his car keys:

A cop walking his beat one night finds a man down on his knees, searching for something on the street.

“What are you doing?” The cop asks.

“Looking for my car keys,” says the man.

The cop helps him look for awhile without success, then says, “Think back. Where were you when you last had your keys?”

“I don’t know,” the man answers. “Down the block on the other side over there, I think.”

“Then, why are you looking here?” the perplexed cop asks.

“Because the light is better under the streetlight,” the man answers.

This hackneyed joke fits today’s educational climate perfectly. Current strategies usually involve forming committees and discussing the problems that are keeping test scores down – without regard to whether or not test scores are actually the problem or merely the symptom of another, greater challenge that needs to be addressed.

Rather than forming multiple committees and launching into lengthy debates about where the test went wrong, though, and why not all our students are ready for college, I know what we ought to try first: Take 20 students at random from a failing school and have each student try to read one page of their science book aloud. Then check for understanding. Many students can pronounce words that are pretty much nonsense syllables to them. Repeat this page-reading exercise in other subjects.  This is so basic I feel stupid writing it down, but many people who ought to be smarter seem to miss a large point nowadays: If a student can’t even understand the simplest paragraphs in a textbook, learning new material becomes hard — or even impossible.

Some students who are being used as fodder in this college-for-all plan are ludicrously far from ready for college – and I am certain textbook choices and time lost to testing and test prep are contributing to that lack of readiness. When we prepare all students for exactly the same test, a portion of those students are being prepared for an inappropriate test – an act tantamount to being taught inappropriate material, material for which they are not yet ready and cannot be made ready with a couple of hours of after-school tutoring. At least part of every grade’s student population in the U.S. today is being prepared to be hit up the side of the head by an educational battleaxe.  Test results document this. These are the students on the farther left side of the testing bell curve.

State test preparation creates its own knock-out blow for these “left-side” students. We hand “Ezekiel” a literature book he cannot read. We know he can’t read the book or we figure this out quickly. Do we then select an appropriate book or class for Zeke?  No, we can’t do that. If we’re a poor district, we may only have that one book. Textbooks are expensive. Some of them cost over $500 apiece, although most cost a more “reasonable” $70 to $100+ something. Even a more prosperous district may not choose to change the book or class, though, because Zeke is supposed to learn what is in the book he was given: This book has been specifically prepared to match the content of the state standardized test.

If Zeke is highly motivated, or his parents are highly motivated, he may come for tutoring or seek help in a resource class, trying to understand what his book says, assuming tutoring is available. My former middle school didn’t offer resource classes the year I first scribbled this down in a notebook, although we did manage a couple of months of Illinois State Achievement Test prep classes after school. We offered free tutoring with outside firms to qualifying students that year, but transportation and language issues often rendered this tutoring unusable. Teacher tutoring time was scarce, between the busses arriving 15 minutes before school, endless meetings after school,* and the natural reluctance of students to give up their half-hour lunch.

One year, a government grant provided funding for a few days of afterschool tutoring each week, along with a Friday homework/test make-up session, but even with those additional learning hours, many students had no chance to catch up to the material being presented each day in class. The one woman tutoring math some days might have 20 students from three grades to help. Those required unit tests written by the outside consulting firm on the East Coast thoroughly documented our failure to catch students up with tutoring. Official, after-school tutoring disappeared again the next year. The district had received a fat grant, too. I am not sure what led to the death of official tutoring. Maybe the absence of any evidence that tutoring was improving test outcomes?

In a lower-scoring school, Zeke’s teacher can have many Zekes. That teacher may be trying desperately to help students read the district’s math or literature book, or he or she may be illegally copying some other, better book, burning through paper in an effort to teach the curriculum without books.  (An unreadable book might as well be no book.)  Regardless, Zeke may quickly decide he hates his classes, especially if his teachers decide to slog through the books that Zeke cannot understand.

*Meetings varied, but I might have all-school, science, mathematics, and bilingual meetings to fit in.

Eduhonesty: One-size-fits-all testing has to stop because it leads to one-size-fits-all educational approaches that grossly underserve many students — not to mention ridiculous numbers of useless or nearly useless meetings. Getting together to figure out how to teach students the same thing at the same time, regardless of whether these students are in bilingual programs, special education or regular classes, inevitably leads to substandard teaching to exceptional students, those students who are unready or long-past-ready to learn the agreed upon Single-Content-to-Rule-Them-All.

Again, I will rephrase a central question that has been posed before by this blog:

How many children and adolescents are resilient enough not to let regular, low test scores affect their view of their potential? This question shouts at teachers giving standardized test after standardized test, but I hear its whispers echoing as we adopt Common Core Standards. I return to those tests I was required to give my students, tests based on standards sometimes more than four years above their documented academic levels of achievement when they first entered my classroom.

One problem with assessing damages from irrational testing rests in the difficulty in measuring human resilience. For some students, those failed tests might as well be water off the duck’s back. The degree to which a kid feels sad or defeated by events varies from day to day and kid to kid. In Myers-Briggs terms, some kids are thinkers, some are feelers and a percentage hover in the middle. Some go down obediently. Some fight back against the injustice of our inappropriate tests and standards. Some judge themselves wanting, while others perceive they are playing a loaded game. Some do whatever they feel like at the moment. If classrooms had chandeliers, a tiny but persistent group of high-energy boys or girls would have to swing on those chandeliers for the pure fun of it, especially on test days.

Current wisdom wants us to believe that resilience can be cultivated through adoption of positive-feedback loops, and I believe that concept stands up to scrutiny – to a degree. The girl who gives herself positive self-messages has a better chance of standing up to today’s testing onslaught than her more pessimistic counterparts. “I will study harder and I will do better on the next quiz” certainly beats “I hate this class and I can’t do math.”

But like autism, resilience and its cousin optimism tend to fall along a spectrum. Some people see that glass as half full, others see it as half empty and a few even see the glass as a dangerous, breakable object that may shatter into sharp shards at any moment. Maybe optimism stems from higher serotonin levels, maybe from familial support and trained coping strategies, and likely often both, but resilience and optimism are not distributed equally.

I helped in a public preschool last year, working with a group of three-year-old children who were mostly nonverbal or barely verbal. They tended to have supportive parents, a reason they were receiving special services from their school district so quickly. Some were laughers, some were criers, and some were prone to tantrums. Laughers sometimes cried and might also have tantrums, but we knew our criers. I can name them still. I can name the kids who would be excited by a new challenge. I can name a few kids who always said, “Help!” and looked anxious when asked to try something new.  If the Principal had asked me to list anxious kids, I could have written out that list. My list might not have been perfect – some kids mask anxiety well and others whine so much they may seem more anxious than they feel – but that list would be a good start. By three-years-of-age, some children react to pressure with fear, and pressure can be as simple as being expected to wash your hands, find the symbol that represents the first letter of your name, and then write your name.

One child’s fun challenge is another child’s “Oh, no!”

I’m drifting a bit as I emphasize the individual differences between America’s students, but I am also becoming progressively more concerned as we attempt to cultivate resilience in our students. Yes, mindset matters. Yes, resilient students do better in school. But I wonder how often we are emphasizing resilience now because we have created a toxic learning climate that is stripping away some or even many students’ self-esteem.

One reason I knew the time had come to retire from teaching: I’d reached the point where I no longer felt like bringing down the hammer on my cheaters. When administration required that I give impossible tests to my students, tests set sometimes a full six years above their documented, functioning, academic level, I had a hard time getting excited about cheating. If I had to play a game I could never win, no matter how hard I tried, I might have cheated too.

I reflect on my last formal group of students sometimes. A few students succeeded under the Common Core No Excuses regime of that year — the academically strongest kids and a few others with exceptional drive and willingness to seek help. But almost everybody else got walloped. I worked relentlessly to keep them in the game, to salvage their hope. Sometimes I bought them Saturday morning McDonald’s treats just to get them to stay in the game.

But every single child in the world is unique. In a fight on the playground, some fold into a fetal position, some come out swinging, some run away, some call for the teacher, and some keep pounding away even after they realize they have lost, and the blood from their nose starts choking them. Some fight fair. Some pull out hair, clumps that blow through the hallway later. (Clearly, I have seen too many fights.)

I expect the Common Core Standards to fail America’s students because those standards have been designed to be One-Size-Fits-All. One size never fits all. The petite women of my acquaintance almost all look silly in serapes hanging down to their calves and ankles.

My last official teaching year felt unreal at times, as administrators kept demanding I give tests and quizzes my students could barely read. To illustrate, I’ll offer another copy of a 7th grade Common Core unit test given to a bilingual student. The special education teacher had to give identical tests and quizzes to her cognitively delayed students, too, and those students’ tests resemble the test below.

This is what happens when a 7^th grade Common Core Unit Test hits a student operating at a 2nd grade level in English and a 3^rd grade level in mathematics up the side of the head. I could pepper this chapter with similar efforts. This is what happens when a student’s academic level differs sharply from a required standard. Raising the standard for this student, absent a tremendous amount of remedial tutoring, will only produce a sillier set of answers, too.

Let’s forget all the details above, though, and ask the one question that matters most: How did this student feel at test’s end?

(Note: I am trying to write a book out here and so will be republishing and adapting some older columns in the near future.)

College libraries are loaded with academic research. Doctoral candidates fill libraries as they attempt to describe the many different states of American education, spewing out reports of varying validity and reliability. Some are excellent, but all are products of their time.

It has occurred to me that much of our older research may be pretty useless. The world has undergone a paradigm shift. America’s students are becoming steadily more linked into the world wide web and steadily less separable from each other, their electronics providing them with a constant barrage of communication. In the meantime, America has many more young, single parents, resulting in many minimally supervised children. Gangs control some neighborhoods. Demographics are changing all over the place.

From http://www.newgeography.com/content/003834-detroit-why-hast-thou-forsaken-me:

The children of today are not the same children who participated in the studies of the sixties, seventies and eighties. Their lives are too different. Their educational experience is necessarily different from those children who were young in the 1900s.

For example, homework studies of the past may genuinely no longer apply to today’s school population. The conditions of homework have changed too greatly. My students can go home and look up an essay, and then copy and paste that essay into a word document, or simply buy the essay outright. Even if they only copy and paste bits, the effect on learning is profound. The effect on integrity is equally profound.

 

Offset hallways are often located near the nurse’s office. They may hold social workers, speech therapists, counselors, paraprofessionals and other support staff.  Special little rooms with calming hammocks, trampolines and stress toys are sometimes sandwiched between classrooms. These hallways may be in the middle of a school, but are more often set off to a side, out of the busiest hallway flow. These are hallways where America’s most challenged children may spend part or even most of their days.

 

In the offset hallways, children who cannot speak press buttons on assistive devices. More often, aides push buttons for them or guide their hands to buttons that answer questions.  

 

In the offset hallways, children with few or no words squirm through devices designed to put pressure on them from above and below. Squeezing comforts and calms them.  

 

Children may sit in their own teacher-designed cubicles. These children work best alone. Perhaps other children disturb them or even make them wordlessly angry. Perhaps they are known to be runners, ready to escape even if they don’t know where they are going or why.

Some children practice adding the number “one” to another number, over and over and over. Mostly they get it right and eventually they will be able to add ‘one” to another number automatically.  They will know that

1 + 13 = 14.

The severely autistic may squirm on the ground, licking the floor, while someone tries to figure out how to get them off that floor without provoking a dangerous tantrum. When a middle-school or high-school boy the size of a football player decides not to cooperate with his special education program, all sorts of strategies may be tried, but in the end, it can be impossible to get that boy off the floor, at least in the short-term. Verbal persuasion only works when a student can understand the words being spoken, and safety comes first. The safest move may be to leave “Jay” on the floor until he decides to get up to take the coloring book or fidget toy being held out to him.

The verbal have learned various coping strategies and kids say to me throughout the day, “I am taking deep breaths.” I smile and say, “I take deep breaths myself.” They smile. They shake a little less.

I know this is not a safe space. The odds of being hurt on any given day are very low, but the social norms that prevent kids from erupting in rage or disappointment also don’t work well here. A scream sometimes cuts through lessons in these offset rooms. Screams come with the territory, especially when a child is frustrated or in pain. When a student has few or no words, that scream may be the best and most effective communication possible. Slaps, punches and bites are possible too.

“She’s a biter,” I was recently warned when I subbed in one of these hallways.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I am small, and probably about as scary as the Easter bunny. In the offset rooms, mostly my size and smile serve me well. I don’t kick off defensive or frightened reactions in many kids, no matter how confusing the world may seem to them. I look safe.

I enjoyed my last day subbing in one of these hallways. My favorite part was art class with a boy with Down Syndrome.  We colored a top-notch frog and created an abstract of randomly traced stencil animals, one on top of the other with various pieces missing. We laughed a lot and we played dueling pencils a little. The boy did not seem able to talk much, but he was an expert snorter. He pointed at pretty parts of the school as we walked to and from class. At one point he did a secret handshake with me. Someone somewhere had taught him a complicated series of moves. When I left to go help the next kid listed on my schedule, he gave me a big smile and did say bye, maybe the third or fourth word of the last hour.

I liked music class too. I can sing “Are you sleeping, Brother John?” and “Row, row, row your boat” with the best of them. I talked for a while with a nice kid whose vocabulary mostly seem to consistently of the words free time and Kanye. He loved music. He made his own when none could be heard around him.

At one point, I talked with an aide about a girl in the class. She cautioned me to be careful about bonding too quickly with the girl. Teachers were working  to help her learn about safe adults. I understood immediately. She’s a pretty girl, and she speaks well enough to hold a conversation. In a way, there’s not much scarier than a very slow, pretty girl who is nice to absolutely everybody. The world’s filled with treacherous twists and turns, including the tiny percentage of crazies who might take advantage of this girl.

Eduhonesty: I am impressed with the offset hallways, their teachers and aides. We try to mainstream students as often as we can, but we still need “life skills” classes. We still need to teach some middle school children to brush their teeth and put on deodorant. We still need to teach them how to make a sandwich and how to clean up when the juice spills.

I think of ESSA with its requirement that all children be prepared for post-secondary education. Is that the best use of our time? For all children? That wordless boy squirming and licking the floor? He’s not going to college. That wordless middle-school girl who moans and bites? She is not going to college either. But if she can be taught enough life skills, she may be able to live independently in a group home someday. At the very least, her aging parents will have an easier time caring for her.

These people writing multi-hundred page laws need to come out of their richly-decorated offices and spend a few days in school hallways — all the school hallways.

Why does he get to play with the fidget spinner?  Why does Tommy get extra time to finish his test? Why can Marigold listen to music? Why can Johnny walk around whenever he wants to and I can’t?

I have put out enough of these IEP-related fires to wonder why educational administrators so seldom address the ancillary challenges posed by liberal provisions within IEP’s.  When we allow certain students toys and behavioral freedoms on-demand,  we automatically create a climate where other students demand their fair share of the fun. IEPs create special problems for classrooms and classroom management, and we should approach these problems with professional developments and training. New teachers especially may need guidance to help them teach the idea that fair is not necessarily equal.

Eduhonesty: Fair is not equal can be a tough sell. Kids believe in fairness and will demand it at an early age. Schools teach fairness. As Junko plays with her glue dots, other students want their own dots. The teacher can’t say, “Well, Junko is special.” Aside from vital privacy questions, she might as well paint a social target on the poor girl’s forehead. (Incidentally, those IEPs are supposed to be private, but free use of fidget toys like glue dots will out our Junkos without a single word said.)

As fidget toys and special behavioral allowances expand their daily use through IEP provisions, new teachers should be given help managing problems created by those provisions. Johnny’s special permission to walk around the classroom, Junko’s anxiety dots, and Marigolds headphones create jealousy. We need to acknowledge this fact and provide training to teachers flummoxed by the growing influx of individual freedoms within the classroom.

A follow-up to the fidget spinner post:

I happen to be a fan of music while working. Being ADHD myself, I have always worked to background noise. I do much better with the clattering of dishes falling to the floor behind me than I do in a quiet library. That’s me, and I am not alone. I used to do needlepoint during college lectures. I naturally feel sympathetic to students who benefit from fidget toys.

But my last post about fidget spinners addressed an ongoing attack on our children’s focus and learning. We have middle school and high school children playing with tiny plastic dots that cling to each other, Wikki Stix^TM, Chewelry^TM and alternative plastic chew toys, classic Silly Putty^TM, magnetic balls or disks. stress balls, various squishy toys, play foam, kinetic sand, rubbery squeeze toys such as Koosh^TM Balls, Velcro strips, and many other fidget toys, not all of them silent in character. No wonder flipping and thumping bottles on tables recently became a hot classroom fashion.

Eduhonesty: We are allowing too many toys. We ought to stick mostly to squeeze balls in regular classrooms. In special education classrooms, we may want to allow the full panoply of fidget toys, but the average language arts or social studies classroom is not benefitting when its students look like a focus group studying kids’ toys. I acknowledge exceptions must be made. Some students with IEPs need to chew special plastics to manage stress, for example.

But these toys are distracting, even when used according to the IEP. Eyes gravitate to fidget spinners, play foam and Koosh balls^TM. The sound of Velcro can reverberate throughout a room. Worse, toys end up being used by many students without IEPs. Sometimes Javier shares. Sometimes Jasmine brings her own Silly Putty^TM,

We are fighting fire with fire out here, using distractions to manage distractibility. Fidget toys can work. Setting fires to create a manmade firebreak protects people from wildfires. But deliberate fires don’t always go as planned. In the year 2000, the wind shifted, and the National Park Service managed to burn down 200 homes near Los Alamos, New Mexico.

The big fidget toy question of today: In the wrong place at the wrong time, is it possible we are burning down some classrooms in order to save them?