“Who knows the answer to _________________ ?”

Well, as a teacher, whenever I ask that question, don’t I already know who knows the answer to ____________ ? I mean, isn’t it all too often the same kid who knew the answer to ______________ yesterday and the answer to __________________ the day before that?

There’s a better way.

Who knows the answer?

One question that has longed bothered me about all of the conversation regarding having one set of national standards for all American schoolchildren is, “If we are going to have standards at all, why should these standards be different from state to state?”

Forget the merit of the standards chosen and the text exemplars cited in the latest information released about the Common Core Standards Initiative. (I know, hard to do.) But can anyone explain the benefit to me of Michigan have one set of English Language Arts standards, Georgia having another and then Texas having yet a third?

And this goes on across all fifty states.

Do any two states at all even share the exact same set of standards? Not any two neighboring states like Mississippi and Arizona? Okay, my geography is off — but that’s because I went to school before there were national standards! (Okay, I am straying here…) I think national standards are the solution for this problem. What is the benefit, especially when American families are more transient than ever moving from state to state, of having different content standards in the same content area across the entire country?

Now before I get pounded with criticism of why national standards are bad, I feel the need to say I hear and find some merit in the arguments against them… and am not even going to try and weigh in on those right now. It’s a different question I am asking.

(And yes, I get the nationalizing education is bad for America argument. And yes, I do hear the complaints about how this is a blatant power grab for centralized control of all our classrooms by politicians. And yes, I do see the link as to how this might actually prove to be a chance for monopolistic corporate behemoths to swoop on in and milk every last dollar from the taxpayer kitty with unprecedented efficiency and accuracy — though I think textbook companies are sweating right now much more so than they are jubilant… more on that at another time. All reasonable, solid points to debate and consider for sure.)

But can someone please make a case for why it is better for individual states to have their own individual sets of standards when the gaping holes between the degree of rigor between some states is so wide, and the language used to describe the same basic ideas from state to state is so varied, that to look at all of them on a kitchen table with a bird’s eye perspective would simply leaving you scratching you head?

Forgetting the political implications of it all (and I know, if education is anything, it’s political… though silly me thought it was supposed to be about the kids) why is a state to state to state standards system better than a national standards system?

In essence, am I missing something or doesn’t this put us all on the same page so that Florida doesn’t value metaphors more than Illinois values relationships between main and subordinate characters in a text while Nevada finds value in etymology?

If you agree with standards-based education, the Common Core Standards Initiative seems kinda logical. If you do not agree with standards-based education then certainly, you are in no way going to be a fan of this. But if you agreed with standards-based education yet think that the content standards for math, English, science and so on should vary depending on which side of the state border you happen to be standing on, I’d love to hear your reasoning.

Think about the immense accomplishment of safely putting a human being on the moon and then returning that person back home to planet earth. Truly, it’s almost unreal when you think about the size and scope of the achievement… and yet, we did it.

But to listen to teachers in America today say, “There is no way to measure teacher effectiveness,” you’d think that interplanetary travel was nothing but a puny science activity compared to the beast that evaluating the professional work a 7th grade English teacher in Anaheim, California would be.

I just don’t buy it.

I mean right now I can fire off an email through a mobile, handheld device from the center of Detroit, Michigan that could be read in China, forwarded to South America and then replied to by a person in Israel all within a matter of minutes, yet gathering reasonable insight into the professional performance of the math teacher down the hall is entirely unachievable?

It’s not.

And we should stop saying it is.

Obviously, this opens up a whole can of worms as to “how” we can measure teacher effectiveness (because that is the real question) so over the course of the next few days, months, and so on, I will speak to a variety of the “how it can be done” aspects to this conversation.

Not that I actually have all, or even any of the answers.

But I do know that the first thing we all must recognize is that yes, it can be done. It is not impossible. It is not beyond human capability. It is not a smaller feat than inventing the wheel, discovering fire, harnessing electricity or slicing bread.

So how about we ask that all teachers in this country take a deep breath and admit the obvious: it’s possible. Truly, before we are able to measure teacher effectiveness, we are all going to have to calmly acknowledge that yes, indeed it can be done.

It might not be easy.
It might not be quick.
It might not be cheap.
It might not be impeccably flawless beyond the pale of any and all criticism (because so many other things in this world have risen to that level so why shouldn’t measuring teacher effectiveness do the same? Author’s note: dripping sarcasm.)
But it is not impossible.

I do wish cooler heads would prevail for this national conversation. Before we can measure teacher effectiveness we are going to have to realize that splitting the atom, mapping the human genome and getting a taxicab in New York City in the pouring rain have all been done.

Measuring teacher effectiveness can be done as well. The question is not one of “if” but of “how”.

And like I said, more on that in the posts ahead.

The Ugly Truth is that my number one goal for my students right now has to be to raise their 2010 standardized test scores.

I find it disturbing, off-base, heart-wrenching, and almost something shameful to admit. However, NCLB has my entire school’s back up against the wall right now. The state is on the doorstep of taking over the district. The district has already informed us that if we sink to the next level of NCLB probation status, tenure for everyone on campus will be voided and jobs will be eviscerated. (Keep in mind that more budget cuts are going to hammer us from the other side, too.)

Essentially, we will be measured by one stat and one stat only in the most high stakes of manners this year. Our standardized test scores will determine our future (individually and collectively, I assume) and people will lose jobs based on the results.

Actually, lots of people will already be losing their jobs. That’s a given. The question is not “if” but “how many” and “who”. (The “when” question is easy to answer: NOW!)

Obviously, much more will be written about this by me over the next few months so I won’t bother to write a 900 page post about all the aspects at this juncture. However, these are the cards we are being dealt: Earn higher standardized test scores and you will be judged favorably. Do not earn sufficiently high enough test scores and you will be chopped.

It’s now that black and white for my English department at Lynwood High School.

More to come…

So I am going to try something new and pose a question. Here we go: Which students deserve our school’s best teachers?

Next I am going to answer the question. (One sec.., it’s coming.) And then I am going to explore this question over the course of the next 3 blog posts (it’s too long to dive into in just one post) as I have divided an argument for my answer into 3 parts.

And then, based on the comments, feedback, answers I get, I am going to see if I still arrive at the same answer I now currently believe after exploring the issue in the ning community and exploring a variety of it’s nooks and crannies.

And so, once again, back to the question: Which students deserve our school’s best teachers?

My answer is ALL our students deserve our best teachers. However, it’s not possible to provide every kid with the school’s best teacher. Not everyone can be best. Thus I will divide teachers into 3 broad categories.

• Best teachers
• Average teachers.
• L’s (the L can stand for “Low” or “Lemons” – fill in your own mental blank).

Furthermore, I am going to divide students into 3 broad categories:

• AP/Honors/Best
• Middle Level/Average
• Challenged/Low

(Note: please don’t hammer me on my political incorrectness – or political correctness – in this “naming of levels” for if I dwell on choosing names that won’t offend anybody across the nation I’ll never get to the more meaty issues in this discussion.)

And now, let me repeat the question again: Which students deserve our school’s best teachers?

And let me repeat my answer again. ALL of them do. But since this is simply not possible to achieve, let’s pretend I am a principal and I need to set up my school. Which teachers do I place with which students?

Here’s what is coming:

• Part II: Why the “best” teachers are needed to be teaching the “best” students.
• Part III: Why the “best” teachers are needed to be teaching the “middle level” students.
• Part IV: Why the “best” teachers are needed to be teaching the “challenged” students.
• Part V: A review of the discussion and a exploration of what I think I’d be forced to do if I were a principal trying to figure out which teachers to assigned to which classes.

Should be interesting – and exciting, controversial, spicy and thoughtful. I’m fired up.

All thoughts are welcomed.

So this is the letter I typed today in my 3rd period class to my principal:

Hi Mr. ___________ (name withheld — but easily googled I am sure),

Mr. Alan

A few things…

1) This is totally true.
2) Jose’s comment went over like an absolute lead balloon. The room went from one of comfort, learning and emotional safety to one of immediate tension and awkwardness. Everyone instantly became uncomfortable.
3) I was flummoxed. The comment was just so inappropriate, so out of left-field, so uncharacteristic of anything that goes on in my room I felt thrown. In my more than a decade of teaching, if I had to rank it, I’d say this was the most inappropriate classroom comment ever uttered in my room. And if you work with teens long enough, you know that you’ve heard some wildly inappropriate things.

The point of the activity was to examine words/phrases and to see if the denotations carry more weight than the connotations or vice versa. My examples on the board were about illuminating the difference between calling someone an “accounting manager” or a “bean counter”. (Similar denotations, wildly different connotations.) So then I had to ask myself, are students today this wildly desensitized to a sense of context, to gauging appropriateness? And in my small effort to try and cut Jose some slack by justifying his actions to myself (i.e.”Oh, Alan, maybe he just didn’t know.”) I realized, “Come on, who am I kidding? Jose was simply pushing the envelope, trying to test my limits. Don’t rationalize it. He was out of bounds.”

So I bounced him out of class with the above letter in hand and told him he wasn’t allowed to come back until the principal had answered his question for him. Such a thoughtful response, I said, required a higher authority on the matter.

Terror ran through the blood of all my other students when I sent Jose on his way. I actually had to lighten up the mood in class because kids mistakenly assumed I was furious with them as a result of something one of their peers did (I was not) — and the tension was simply too thick, a real pink elephant — so we talked about the denotation versus the connotation of the phrase “fly on the wall” and I briefly chatted about how much fun it would be to able to eavesdrop on the conversation Jose was going to have with the principal of our school about his classroom question.

Within a few minutes, things became more relaxed again.

You know, once a person graduates from high school, the days spent in our classrooms often blend into amorphous blobs of scattered recollections. For some reason though, I have a feeling Jose will always have one particular day in English class well-etched into his memory.

As we all know, you can’t be an effective teacher unless you have a line in the sand. And once it’s crossed, there must be consequences. My guess is that by lunchtime, all of my 9th graders will have heard this story, too. Gossip travels faster than a stolen teacher’s test with the answer key does around these parts.

And I expect very few behavior problems in 3rd period for quite some time. LOL!

Saw this story in Newsweek magazine (well, the online version) called The Principal and The Paddle. Being that my school is a “struggling school” and that I LOVE to bring reading ripped right from current headlines into class, I let ‘er rip.

And goodness did it. I mean a virtual tidal wave of energy and enthusiasm. Class was simply roaring — all because of a simple question.

Should we paddle students in the Lynwood Unified School District?

Actually, that wasn’t how I started. To begin, I framed the lesson by having students write a well-executed paragraph citing three ways our Vice Principal could improve student discipline on campus. (This throws back to the pot smoking in the halls from last Friday before I left for the weekend per my previous blog post.)

Not a darn one of them suggested “paddling”. And when I tossed this idea into the mix, all of them were 100% against it. Literally, ALL of them. This made it really fun for me because I got to play devil’s advocate during the ensuing discussion — not that I am for physical discipline in our schools but it’s quite a kick to wear the black hat and defend a POV simply for the sake of stoking some student fires.

Then we read the aforementioned article.

Next we did a re-read whereby I asked my students to take copious notes, underlining, finding evidence, and so on. I told them that no one would get to talk unless they could include a textual citation from the Newsweek piece to support the point they were about to make during our forthcoming “debate”. Re-reading is something it feels like my kids are rarely asked to do — yet how much better is their comprehension improved by taking a second pass? When you are not the world’s greatest reader, small strategies like this often make HUGE dents.

Suddenly, after the re-read and the note-taking, I had a class full of damn lawyers bombing me (and one another) with well-supported evidence. Whoa! Suddenly, the level of argumentative competition in the room had changed.

Then we shifted gears whereby I slightly altered the question to:

Should we paddle elementary school students in the Lynwood Unified School District?

Time to write a new paragraph citing three reasons for their belief, pro or con. (Note: This is why writing is so darn valuable. The old question of, “How do I know what I really think until I see what I have to say?” is never more true. Kids think they know how they feel but it’s often muddled and fuzzy. Writing brings clarity and prepares them to be thoughtful participants in a class debate… instead of mere, “toss some stuff off of the top of my head and shout it really loud when I want to add emphasis” contributors. It’s a world of difference.)

BLAM! The fireworks began. Immediately, I went from the only one arguing for paddling to merely facilitating and moderating a heated debate. Opinions were flying on both sides of the aisle and lots of intelligent support was being evidenced from all angles. It was great!

At the end of class we took a vote. The decision:

LET’S PADDLE THEIR BUTTS!

(Tomorrow’s lesson: an exploration of mankind’s hypocritical nature revolving around the quote, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” LOL!)