MsThirteen's Open Salon Blog

These Kids Deserve So Much Better.

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:01:20 -0500

My district administrators have proposed over 20 million dollars in new cuts for next year. Granted, I am from a large district, but these cuts are deep – deeper than I thought possible. Most of these cuts come directly impact classroom instruction or maintenance. None of the proposed cuts come from administration.

The only conclusion that I can make of these recommendations is that the administrative office no longer feels that it is important for schools to teach children. Nor is it important to provide a safe place for them to learn. Our function will become more of warehousing students, keeping track of them during the day, and less about actually teaching them something.

Our district has proposed increasing class size. This has been a common cost cutting measure in many districts throughout the country. In most, it has meant increasing class size from 15 to 18 or 20. In much of California, it is increasing class size from 20 to 30 in the earliest grades and the ninth grade English and math. For the rest of 7-12 grade, classes may increase to as much as 42. But for me, my class size won’t increase – last year, it was increased to 32 for grades 4,5, and 6. It is controversial over whether or not merely reducing class size increases test scores, but it makes for much more effective teaching. Teachers actually can spend time with each student to fully assess their needs, and they can make adjustments and modifications to the curriculum to meet these needs, for the second language learner, the learning disabled and the gifted.

In addition to increasing class size, the administration has recommended that all prep teaching positions be eliminated for elementary schools. For the last several years, our schools have had science, computers and PE teachers at each school, which allowed each teacher from 1^st through 6^th grade, a 40 minute period a day, usually, to plan curriculum, correct papers, meet with grade-level teams, communicate with parents and analyze student data. It also provided highly qualified teachers to provide specialized curriculum in science, PE and technology. Last year, as part of the cuts made, prep was reduced to a 20 minute a day for 1^st through 3^rd grade teachers while the students are at lunch recess, and 100 minutes of PE prep for 4^th through 6^th grade. We are left with less time to prepare, with more (PE, science and technology) to prepare for.

Next year, if they eliminate all prep, we will have to include planning and implementing PE in our planning time, of which we will have none. I am not sure when the district administration would like me to plan, correct papers, or meet student individualized needs, let alone meet with colleagues or improve my teaching practice. I am not sure the people who are making these decisions know that teaching is more than being in a room with 32 students. It is more than opening a text book and reading a lesson to the kids. Assessing learning is more than taking a publisher-provided test, scanned for correction.

The only conclusion I can come to is that we are just to hold the students in a room (a poorly maintained room, based on the custodial and maintenance proposed cuts), and make sure they don’t harm each other. They can’t expect me to actually teach nor the kids to learn anything under these conditions.

They also are proposing early retirement packages, for both administration and teaching staff – which will mean that there will be more teachers and administrators with less experience.

I am not sure what next year – or beyond – is really going to look like. I am not sure I am equipped for it all. These kids deserve so much better.

Why Education and Politics Don't Mix

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:01:40 -0500

Both politicians and educators enter their fields to make the world a better place. I have no real evidence of this, but I am going to assume that it is true. As a teacher, I know that I became a teacher so I could teach kids. I like kids, I like being around them, and I like the idea of providing the best possible education to them. I assume politicians enter politics because they like the community and want to serve it and feel they can do it well.

And how do we know we are doing well? Politicians know they are doing well when they get reelected. The populous decides they like the job they have been doing and elect them to another term. They may also get to see real changes made to the community that they felt strongly about – a preserved hillside, a new, thriving business district, a change in policy. Change they helped make happen can give them the reassurance they are doing their job well.

Evaluating teacher success has become a hot-button issue. The current “Race to the Top” has tied federal funding of education reform dollars to using student achievement for assessment of teacher evaluation. There is an emphasis on high stakes testing and using those results to evaluate how well a teacher or school is serving the community. Because of the impossible nature of the task, I am opposed to using student achievement on standardized assessments for teacher evaluation. (for more information, see the highly accessible, informative video here)

So how do I know if I am doing my job well? It is true that part of how I know I am doing my job well is that students learn things. We talk about stuff and then I ask them to prove that they know it, and they do. For example, we spend weeks talking about one aspect of American history. Right now we are talking about explorers. We have spent three weeks just going over different explorers and different reasons people went out and ended up in the ‘New World’. Today, I asked them to give me an adjective to describe “explorers” for a sentence building activity we were going to do. Not only did they give me lots of adjectives, many of them came directly from what they have learned about explorers over the last few weeks. They came up with words as varied as “adventurous”, “murderous” and “Italian”. This is not the only assessment I will do to determine if they have retained what the state standards require, but this was a good ‘check’. None of this would show on a standardized test – the state does not test history until middle school.

The attitude of the students will also tell me about how well I am doing my job. Students, like all of us, prefer order. They want predictable expectations and a sense or order in the classroom. They don’t like it when the class is out of control – they don’t feel safe, and if they don’t feel safe, they cannot learn. I am constantly asking my students to reflect on an activity or experience. I, as the teacher, am in control of the classroom environment. If my students are uncomfortable, feel threatened, are argumentative or disrespectful, I know I am not doing my job well. Likewise, if they are happy, even if they don’t really want to do something required (testing, for instance), I know I am doing my job well. There is no standardized, bubble-in test that can measure this happiness and feeling of well-being.

I am constantly informing my teaching. I talk to other professionals, read and reflect on teaching as a practice. I am always striving to improve what I do. I take classes, learn new things, read both education writing and content-related writing. I read children’s literature, looking for new books to share with my class. Constantly reflecting on what I do, and trying to push myself to be better is another way I know I am doing my job well.

I know there are areas in which I need to improve. I need to be more organized, I need to pay more attention to my English Language Learners. I really need to spend more time with the Everyday Math curriculum.

None of this, not the good nor the bad, shows up in standardized testing. Politicians want the measure – they want to look at test data and decide who is doing a good job. How can test data tell them this?

I am all for removing ineffective teachers from the classroom. I am not sure how this can be done equitably, but I am pretty sure that you can’t connect it to test scores. Student achievement is not entirely in the hands of the teacher. It is in the hands of the whole community. Are the children healthy? Do they have a good diet? Are they getting enough rest? Do they have stress at home? Do they have plenty of outside time? If you want to use standardized test scores to evaluate something, use it to evaluate the health of the community as a whole, not just one part of it.

Who, then is responsible for the community? Why, we the people of the community are responsible. And in our society, how to we ensure the community we live in is well taken care of? We elect officials – politicians- to office to take care of the community. So – if we are going to use standardized test scores to evaluate how someone is doing their job, it should be the politicians.

Now, I honestly don’t think you should use test scores to evaluate any one’s performance, other than the performance of a student on a particular assessment. I am in full agreement that our education system is broken. I am in complete agreement that changes need to be made. I am working in the broken system, trying to do the best that I can with what little I have been give, with the great needs of the students in my class, and trying to get them as far as they can go. I need help, I need support. I am doing my job well, even if the test scores don’t show it.

Phone Home

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 22:01:35 -0500

Two of my students called home today. I have had about a month of implementing our new program for behavior, and these two students are still requiring reminders, several times a day, to follow the expectations. So today, I had it with them. At lunch today, I had them call home.

I figured calling home was the worst I could do. I have sent home notes, but kids are smart with notes. They hand them to their parents with a long explanation of what happened, while the parents are distracted and in a hurry. Maybe they hand it to them as they pull up to the school drop off in the morning, “Hey, can you sign this from my teacher?” with no time for review. If I were to call, the student would then get the opportunity to share, uninterrupted, his or her side of the story, with careful editing. This way, when they call home in the middle of the day, the parent knows I am serious and I can listen to what the student says. And to them, it is mortifying.

When I summoned the two students over to call, I heard several pleas of “just one more chance”. I don’t know why they do this – I NEVER give them one more chance. If they are asking, it is because they have used all their chances. One of them cried. He was terrified his mom was going to be mad. And I said that I bet she was, but I had been angry for weeks, and his behavior hadn’t changed. Now maybe if his mom was mad, he would see how serious this was and turn it around.

I have yet to punish either of these students. There is no benefit to punishment. Both of these kids have been punished over and over and they don’t see it as a real threat. We can’t do anything that is effective or creates intimidation. We can take away recess and fun activities, but there is always another activity or recess coming up.

My afternoon with these two was better. One of them continued to act up a bit, but settled down eventually. It rained all day, and we were all a bit stir-crazy, so it was hard to tell what was misbehavior and what was cabin fever. I am hoping tomorrow they respond better to reminders. Only time will tell.

Where Are They Now?

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 14:12:32 -0500

I have been teaching long enough that the group of students in my first year teaching kindergarten at my current school, are now seniors in high school. The following year, I taught second grade, and those students graduated last June. Some of these students were also in my class when I taught fifth and sixth grade, as I have moved up in grades as they have.

I am in touch with several former students and I know what their plans are, but I want to know about all of them. I want to know what happened when they left the classroom we created together and went out into the world. I have decided I am going to try to keep track.

Of the current seniors, their plans are just formulating. Most of these students haven’t heard yet from colleges. I wrote before about the two young men who participated in early acceptance for Humboldt State University. Another former student has been ‘decision deferred’ (not really a rejection, but not an acceptance either) from MIT and Cal Tech. She has yet to hear from the other places she applied to – the UC system has been so overwhelmed and decisions from them aren’t usually sent until early spring. Others, I know, have planned on attending the local community college (they call it “Harvard on the Hill”) for both budgetary and academic reasons. With the current economic situation and the hike in fees, some parents cannot afford to send kids away to college. Other students didn’t take the required classes to go to college or they didn’t get good enough grades.

For those that graduated last year, it is harder for me to track. Many of them I haven’t seen since they left elementary school, and I don’t know where they attended junior high or high school. I see some working in town, but I don’t know if they are working or working and going to college. I know a few of them attend the local community college, some because they didn’t get into the university of their choice due to cut backs in admissions last year. I know of one at San Francisco State, but this is the only one of that group that I know for certain is in a four year university.

I have the expectation that everyone who comes through my classroom will attend some form of post-high school education. Some will go to the local community college, some will take vocational education courses, I but I assume the majority will go to four-year universities. Going forward, I intend to keep a posted list of the colleges and universities my former students attend. I want the students who sit in these chairs, at these desks, to know that going to college is not only an option, but a realistic expectation for them. That college isn’t for other kids, but for kids just like them.

Is it a Race if You Don't Run?

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:12:47 -0500

Our district has decided not to enter the race. We have received unofficial word that our district has decided NOT to apply for the competitive grants under the Race to the Top program through the federal government. Apparently, we wouldn’t qualify. Our community is large and we don’t have a high enough percentage of socio-economically disadvantaged families, nor do we score low enough on high stakes assessments.

What does this mean? I am not sure. What I think it means is that we will not be eligible for any federal money for reform or improvement. We will not be getting any additional support to cover any intervention we need to provide for students. I have no idea what it means for current levels of funding or how it impacts current programs. I do know, though, that it means that there won’t be anything new or innovative coming out of our district.

I do not mean to imply that our district should apply for these monies. They are going to be hard to get and probably come with a lot of accountability and restrictions and reporting, as well as open up any district that does apply to criticism. I also don’t think our district has a plan to implement. The funds are based on innovative improvements. I haven’t seen anything innovative out of our district. We are high enough performing that we haven’t needed to innovate until now – when we are being held accountable for the huge differences in academic performance between schools within our district and our classic achievement gap among Latinos and African American students as compared to white and Asian students. And this innovation, from what I have seen, is just to ‘teach it again’ to the lowest performing students. The attempt to bridge this difference is to provide intervention classes, using the adopted curriculum. Isn’t what didn’t work to begin with?

Our district, under mandate, is implementing a pull-out, short term intensive instructional model for the lowest performing students. It was approved over the summer, but they are just now hiring teachers for the positions. They wanted well-qualified teachers, who had three or more experience in our district. Very few teachers wanted to leave existing classrooms to do this. We have put our sweat and energy into our students – we get attached and form bonds, develop a way to be together. I bet if they had posted these positions in the first three weeks of school, well-qualified teachers would have been all over them. As it is, they have resorted to looking at teachers who were laid off last year due to budget cuts because not enough existing teachers applied.

Clearly, I do not understand this dance of funding. I am afraid, though, that many of us will be left out of the innovative loop. I hope our district is listening to what others are doing. I hope that we get to hear about innovations and best practice.

I am not sure what this is going to bring in the future, or not bring, as it were. I would prefer to be on the cutting edge, even if that means potentially getting pushed off.