Not so sure I buy into the “objective measure” argument in regards to student test scores being an inarguable method of insight into teacher performance. I mean just because all kids take the same test well, does it really mean that their performance on those tests translate so flawlessly to “windows on the teacher at the front of the room”?.

For example, just the other day a teacher in 11th grade showed me his grade book for his 5th period class.

It looked like it had been shot up by gunfire. Zero, zero, zero… bullet holes everywhere.

He showed me a kid who had perfect attendance and yet had 17 doughnut holes (i.e. “did not turn in work”, scores of zero) in a row.

The kid came.
The kid showed up.
The kid did nothing.

The kid has issues. He is short a zillion credits, doesn’t even bring a backpack to school and certainly doesn’t look like he has much of a chance of graduating.

Conversely, another kid in that same class has terrible attendance… but shows up just often enough so that the school has not yet bounced him off the roster.

Bullet holes in the grade book – for both of them. It’s an entire class like that.

Are either of these kids going to reflect test scores that 1) favor this teacher or 2) prove anything about this teacher’s merit?

Cause this is a good teacher. A guy who tries. A guy who shows up and takes the “lowest kids” because he feels he can reach them.

And he likes to reach them. It’s his life’s work. But nope, he doesn’t reach all of them. Not even close.

Aren’t these kids actually illuminating shortcomings of…
-parents?
-community?
-truant officers?
-administration?
-politicians?
…as much as they are illuminating the shortcomings of educators?

Does this man deserve to be demonized? Who is going to want to take on our most challenging kids, the ones that need the most help, if there are draconian punishments waiting for those who do not “deliver measurable performance”?

Perhaps he reaches all those kids… when they are 22 years old and finally decide that they are gonna stop being a screw-up and listen to Mr. _______’s words — the ones that have been hauntingly careening through their head for the past seven years?

Now, take a guess at what an AP Calculus teacher’s grade book looks like. There might not be straight A’s for everyone but it certainly isn’t bullet holes all around either.

Those kids work. They show up, turn in assignments and even do extra credit assignments when they already have an A in the course.

Whaddya think his scores are going to reflect on the state tests? (Especially since they barely touch on Algebra II in their most challenging form.)

Doesn’t the actual teaching assignment you get directly have a correlation to the test scores your students deliver? At least in a measure that deserves some real weight?

And is any weight given?

BZZZPP!!

No, it is not.

(Because that’s just liberal coddling and buying into having low expectations for our children, I assume. After all, it’s No Child Left Behind by 2014… even if they are leaving themselves behind.)

Just not sure about how apples equal oranges on this front. And I am HUGELY skeptical of the word “objectivity”.

There is no way to work in a school today without the very clear recognition that the cracks are expanding. The question is, how do we prevent ourselves from cracking up amid the crumbling?

Kids used to just fall through cracks. But “kids”, at least as the phrase’s original connotation indicated to me, implied single kids (despite the use of the plural which I took to mean “one at a time.”) Or it meant a certain type of kid. It left one with the impression that a “kid falling through the cracks in the system” was an anomaly, a rare, but sad and regrettable bird, one that someone somewhere was diligently working to prevent in the future.

But nowadays, this expression has taken on (and is about to take on even more so) a whole new meaning.

Not just some kids, not just a bunch of kids, but many, many, many kids will fall through the cracks in the system in the next few years because the system is officially cracked and these budget cuts are taking a drill bit to the fault line.

For example, my own school district has forecast a projected 16 million dollar deficit after the operation of the 2009/2010 school year so something like 18% — 22% of our district’s teaching force was just pink slipped.

We’re still going to service roughly the same amount of kids, though. We’re just going to do it with 20% less educators (and a slashing of “fluff” classes like computers, art, music, and so on).

And all this as we face the oh-so-gentle stick of NCLB. Lest anyone forget, my high school is sinking towards Probation Level 4 in the DoE Circle of Educational Hell. I’m sure that less people actually trying to remediate our issues is going to help a heck of a lot, though. Wonder if they’ll take that into consideration when evaluating our bubble tests next year?

They raise the bar. They slash the resources to achieve the targets. Then they paint the people who work there as imbeciles who couldn’t teach a hungry monkey how to peel a banana.

I mean from my Superintendent on down to lil’ old me, what’s a fella to do? I know, I know, roll with the punches… but how many more punches can we all be expected to take before we are considered to be too punch drunk to soberly and successfully go about performing our jobs?

And it ain’t just Lynwood that is cracked. As this report states, nearly 60% of this Chicago school’s students will not be graduating from 8th grade, to the great shock of both the students and parents, of course. I mean I too could clearly see how my child was all beefed up on books and ready for Harvard but then voila, turns out she’s flunked 8th grade (along with the lion’s share of her peers) and here I was totally clueless about my kid’s — or her entire graduating class’s — performance. Totally believable.

Not that the school is above reproach, though. I’m sorry, but if 60% of your entire 8th grade is failing, guess what folks? The people working at the school are failing, too. Take some freakin’ ownership!

In that spirit, are Lynwood’s shortcoming my own fault as well? Absolutely. I must, if I am to accept any credit in the areas where we achieve, accept culpability for our shortcoming’s as well. After all, am I not my co-teacher’s keeper?

Usually, I’d crack a smarmy joke right about now in this point of the blog. Go for the smile with a small twist of the knife to boot. But guess what. These cracks are serious business and where the hell are our kids going to be in 3 years if we continue down this path.

Crack. It’s like we’re smoking it.

At some point — hopefully before my grandkids enter school — America is going to go to growth model assessments.

And once they do, watch out!

As I just blogged about yesterday, Newsweek issued a list identifying our country’s best high schools… but this doesn’t seem to take into account one of the most critical measures of any “teacher’s effectiveness”:

HOW MUCH DID THE STUDENTS GROW OVER THE COURSE OF THE YEAR?

People in schools like mine routinely get kids who are reading and writing at levels years below grade level yet, do we get any credit when we take a 15 year old kid who is at a 4rth/5th grade reading level and elevate them to an 8th/9th grade level (3-4 years growth in one year)? Not when they take 10th grade bubble tests we don’t.

And my school gets dragged through the mud for having scores and scores of kids who don’t “bubble up.”

It’s as if all of us working in these NCLB schools that are sinking deeper and deeper into the throes of probation are a bunch of loafers. A bunch of slackers. A bunch of preposterously over-coddled tenure-ites who live off the fat of the land and do little to nothing over the course of a year.

Newsweek thinks that if more of my kids simply took more AP tests (not performed well on them, but simply took them) and we brought in IB and a bunch of other high fallutin’ acronyms, we’d deserve notoriety.

A teacher named Gary Anderson had this to say…

My school is on the list. We’re 715, up from 958 last year. This is good news for the real estate market around here.

I’m actually sort of ashamed of our ranking. Yes, we’re a good school, but I make that claim in spite of our AP philosophy, not because of it. We literally push kids into AP classes, even when it overwhelms them. It sure looks good when the Newsweek and US News & World Report rankings come out–which are mostly based on how many AP tests are taken (not how well the students scored)–but many, many students get roughed up in the process. Real estate agents and parents who like to brag to their relatives get very excited about these rankings, but I’ve seen the emotional and physical toll it takes on some kids. It’s not worth it.

When students who would be better served in a regular-level class are forced into an AP class where they are in over their heads, they are not only a drag on the AP class, but the regular-level classes where they could have been stars are worse off without them.

Wow, huh?

Adults in the world of public schooling are treating education like it’s a game, as if there are winners and losers and rules to learn in order to play well.

I thought the objective was to educate ALL our kids.

How naive of me.

Bring on the growth model assessments!! As my grandfather used to say, “If we can land a man on the moon…”

Social promotion is the scourge of public education today. The fact is we are simply passing our kids on up the ladder whether or not they have demonstrated any sort of comprehension of the subject matter they are supposed to have learned in the class/course/grade level in which they are enrolled. This folly creates a ripple effect of domino-like failure because most of our education system is predicated on knowing what comes before in order to be able to succeed now and thereby prosper later.

For example, when kids don’t learn their multiplication tables it becomes almost impossible to do their algebra. Without their algebra, they can’t do geometry. Without geometry, they can’t pass high stakes tests like the California High School Exit Exam… so then they can’t earn their high school diploma.

Obviously, we need to stop stop the students from moving up the ladder — before they take the exit exam, before they enroll in geometry, before they take algebra — and ensure that they know their foundational skills like multiplication tables before the ensuing calamity befalls them when they are teenagers.

Thus we need gatekeeping checkpoints. I mean, if a students does not possess a certain minimum level of aptitude in specific subject matters, it’s ridiculous to move them up in the system because we are simply setting the kids up to fail.

Logical, right?

I think we need checkpoints before students enter school in grade 1 (so we can assess their aptitude before they even enter school to determine whether they can write their name, read, and so on. I mean some kids come in ready to read chapter books and some kids come in lacking the ability to recognize sight words — the difference is HUGE and if we continue to toss them all in the same class when their needs are so drastically different, we are feeding the social promotion monster right out of the gate).

Then we need checkpoints at grade 4, grade 8 and grade 12. (Well, grade 12 are already in place, dysfunctional as they may be in so many places — but don’t get me started on bubble tests. The assessments we need also have a need… to be re-imagined, but that’s for a different blog post.)

Sadly, however, the fact is that public education is in such general disarray that we’d be retaining too many kids at the lower levels with a checkpoint system and adults in policy circles all over the U.S. quake at the idea of eventually having 16 year old boys in classes with 12 year old girls as this system would seem to create. So since we can’t handle the volume of kids who need to be retained, re-taught, worked with some more because they learn at a different pace through a different modality, perhaps, we simply pass them on up with an F on their record.

Hello, social promotion. I mean what if NASA allowed their pilots to fly rocket ships without being able to even get a crop-duster off the ground. There’d be crashes everywhere and people would be screaming STOP, you freakin’ fools. Lives are being destroyed because of this nonsense.

Now don’t get me started on how we also pass these kids up with feelings of incompetence, low academic self-esteem and an attitude of why bother to even try because I’m too stupid to learn this stuff anyway. Even though they are failing our classes, we are teaching them things, that’s for sure. And the things we are teaching them emotionally hurt. (And we wonder why the kids act out?)

Yes, our problems are complicated problems, that’s for sure. But until someone puts a stop to the nonsense that is social promotion the entire system is going to continue to buckle. After all, a house built on a weak, pathetic foundation simply will not stand.

We need gatekeeping checkpoints. And considering that I proctored state tests today whereby kids all over my school were being asked to solve problems about Y intercepts, linear inequalities and quadratic equations on a graph with sloping, curving lines — and this is on the Algebra I test — is there any wonder that the chances of my school doing well this year are diminished by the fact that so many of our students struggle with things like long division and quickly decipher things like the answer to 9 x 7? Yet when they were struggling, when their teachers saw that they did not know the material, when years ago the educators knew that, “Hey kid, if you don’t get this, there’s no way that you are going to get that later on,” where were our policy makers then?

Why is it that common sense is so uncommon in our schools?

No one climbs a ladder without being able to step up from a prior rung.