Fighting the White Knight

Can we save education from today’s onslaught of misguided testing and inappropriate — sometimes even ridiculous — standards? What about the other codified and uncodified good intentions that keep upending our classrooms? That subtitle above is a mouthful and it doesn’t even explicitly capture my chapter on the student loan debacle.

My recently published book can easily be found by putting “Fighting the White Knight Jocelyn Turner” into a search engine. That single act awes me a little. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and so many little bookstores and unfamiliar websites seem to have my book. Poshmark even lists a couple of copies.

Reader, I would be so happy if you would order my book. Kindle and ebook copies are available. I hope for kind reviews, although I also expect to get slammed by some readers. I am calling the current system broken, while demanding that we increase educational time and funding to cover remedial education. I want a longer school year in some places, as well as more consideration for “old-fashioned” educational approaches that do work when appropriately applied.

The system has to change. Piecemeal fixes and occasional grants have not been narrowing the achievement gap. I expected the post-COVID gap to widen significantly, and the data has been bearing me out. A reading and math disaster has been underway, and reading is the foundation upon which all educational success ultimately rests. That disaster unsurprisingly kicked the kids hardest who were already down.

To quote from https://hechingerreport.org/massive-learning-setbacks-show-covids-sweeping-toll-on-kids/:

“… the average student lost more than half a school year of learning in math and nearly a quarter of a school year in reading – with some district averages slipping by more than double those amounts, or worse. Online learning played a major role, but students lost significant ground even where they returned quickly to schoolhouses, especially in math scores in low-income communities.

When you have a massive crisis, the worst effects end up being felt by the people with the least resources,” said Stanford education professor Sean Reardon, who compiled and analyzed the data along with Harvard economist Thomas Kane.*

Yes, the US educational system works wonderfully in many lucky locations. I live in a district that sometimes makes national news because of its first-rate schools. We lost ground to COVID locally, but comparatively came out not too badly damaged — and my neighbors have a long history of hiring expensive tutors to fill in learning gaps.

But I worked elsewhere. I have seen the effect of property-tax-based school funding in areas where houses are cheap and industry scarce. I have seen what happens when remediation does not happen; children who are lost become more lost because bodies and hours needed to fill in past learning gaps simply don’t exist. Those districts with more money can hire more paraprofessionals, but our least financially endowed districts may even struggle to buy enough paper. Parents who are struggling to make the rent because of rising food costs are not hiring tutors or checking out Kumon classes.

So I wrote a book. I am cleaning up a second book right now, one that helps explain in detail how No Child Left Behind and the Common Core failed to bring us out of today’s harsh, luck-of-the-zipcode landscape. I promise readers that “Fighting the White Knight” contains a great deal of food for thought.

Join me in my journey?

Social media sites where I can be found:

  • pinterest.com/jocelyntheplaid (2 education sections and some fine iced coffee recipes, etc.)
  • facebook.com/jocelyn.turner.75
  • instagram.com/shastatheplaid (mostly watercolors)
  • biographyjar.com (just for fun — education has only bled into the fabric on occasion)
  • I am almost nonexistent on the former Twitter now, but I may rejoin the group when the dust settles, if enough of the old crowd are still there.

*https://hechingerreport.org/massive-learning-setbacks-show-covids-sweeping-toll-on-kids/

One School Year Does Not Fit All — and Effectively Discriminates Against Some

A few interesting pre-COVID observations:

In 2019, a full 10.4% of students in public schools were English learners according to EducationWeek — more than 1 in 10 kids. No matter where anyone stands on immigration, that’s a formidable number of kids who required robust, targeted, language-learning support within our schools. This large chunk of our student population should have been receiving support in the form of afterschool and week-end programs, not to mention summer school — effectively requiring a longer school year.

Our distribution of English learners has not been not falling evenly across US schools. According to Education Week, 64% of teachers in the 2017-2018 school year had at least one English learner in their classrooms. If we flip this on its head, that means, 36% — or more than one in three teachers — did not have any English learners.

(From an EducationWeek quiz sponsored by Lexia Learning that popped into my email.)

I don’t entirely agree with the quiz and current writings on the subject of how to help language learners: in particular, these students don’t need access to grade-level texts! I strongly believe part of our struggle to manage bilingual education comes from unrealistic, good intentions — all the kids who are receiving unreadable texts in a scenario where they don’t begin to have the time necessary to conquer the challenge we have thrown at them. Some of these texts are not mountains — they are moon launches.

But common misconceptions mentioned in the quiz email are real:

Yes, our bilingual students are often assumed to be unintelligent because of their language struggles.

Yes, parents and others may believe that EL services take away learning opportunities from non-EL peers. Especially in financially disadvantaged neighborhoods, this may even be true: when there is a finite pool of money and it’s not enough from the outset, any and every program in a sense is taking money away from other programs. In a meagerly-funded school district, not all of those cheated programs will be fluff or “extra” opportunities.

Eduhonesty: And then COVID arrived and many areas went to virtual learning. The net result appears to have been a decline in English learning, especially in younger grades — a true concern since data has been documenting academic stagnation in students who become long-term participants in English-learning programs.

Still, the meaning of the downward trend in language learning growth suggested by aggregate student data from 2021 — at least compared to 2020 and 2019 — cannot be honestly quantified. Testing windows changed and many students skipped testing entirely, leading to “concerns among state education agencies that the most vulnerable English-learners weren’t tested, said Amaya Garcia, deputy director of preK-12 education at the think tank New America.” The test population changed at the same time groups of students received different amounts of test preparation than had historically been expected.

Tests showed “relatively larger declines in speaking, according to WIDA’s report, and in 1st and 6th grades… with “more declines in language growth in the younger years,” concerning “since there’s the hope that children will become proficient early enough to exit out of an English-learner program by 4th grade to avoid the risk of becoming a long-term English-learner, who may end up stagnated academically.”

See “The Complicated Picture of English-Language Learners’ Progress During the Pandemic.”*

Eduhonesty: Even if the numbers are fuzzy, that learning loss is real. You don’t need a meteorologist to see which way the wind blows. Students who spent months isolated from the outside world lost the opportunity to practice speaking with English-speaking peers. Students in houses with limited technology, or new, late-arriving, unfamiliar technology, lost ground when compared to students who already had all the tech, not to mention parents who found zooming and its equivalents effortless.

Do we honestly want to tackle the COVID damage to English-learning? If we do, I suggest we must extend the school year for those students who fell behind. When everyone goes to school for about 180 days, the kids who are already ahead naturally get further ahead. Previous learning is the platform upon which we build today’s learning — and the kids who already have larger vocabularies and more background knowledge can learn faster than less fortunate counterparts. Vocabulary is a source of learning as well as a result of learning. We must make certain that students receive the opportunity to learn the words they missed — and have been missing — as our schools barrel forward, teaching standards that only sometimes fit the students within US classrooms.

P.S. Yes, it may be racist to demand that every EL become ‘proficient’ in English — although I’ll observe that any education for our ELs that does not target the acquisition of English language vocabulary must be considered equally or more racist. English remains far and away the primary business language of this country. Adults with a limited English-language vocabulary too often end up condemned to lower-paying jobs in backrooms in the service sector, or worse.

A memory: My student’s mom had a job putting a small part inside another small part in a factory. She did not know what she was making. She just endlessly, hour after hour, stuck one part inside another. We talked about how she wanted to improve her English in hopes of getting “a job on the floor” — a job with benefits, in other words, real paychecks, and even air-conditioning. I hope she got there. But those backrooms without air conditioning and those 29-hour-a-week jobs that keep a person right below the hours needed to qualify for healthcare benefits? Those backrooms and 29-hour jobs are everywhere in the US.

Email from education Week on 3/16/23. titled Quiz|Supporting English Language Learners

*https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/the-complicated-picture-of-english-language-learners-progress-during-the-pandemic/2021/11#:~:text=What%20do%20we%20know%20from,of%20the%20four%20language%20domains. By Ileana Najarro — November 02, 2021 | Corrected: November 03, 2021

Short Thoughts that Can Help Teachers: #1 Major Projects

I believe I have an especially savvy group of readers. I don’t think my readers require much in the way of classroom management advice. But it’s September and some of you are newbies — in a time when fashions sometimes cram all of us together into overcrowded lifeboats. So I thought I’d run a small stream of useful observations:

Larger class projects heavily favor the self- and grade-motivated. Sometimes these students effectively take over the whole project, directing struggling students to paste shiny stars or glitter on backboards, or write a simple section that the self- and grade-motivated student then almost entirely rewrites.

My own thoughts: If you can’t do a project mostly in class where you can watch group dynamics unfold, I’d avoid that project. I’d also create related assignments to ensure that weaker or less-motivated members can’t simply hand all the hard work to fellow student “Frankie”– who really, really wants that “A” and is perfectly willing to do ALL the work if that’s what the “A” demands. Frankie probably does not care if fellow group members learn the actual content the project teaches.

Eduhonesty observation: EVEN WITH STRONG SUPERVISION, group projects mostly favor the students who least require extra help and remedial education.

You Can’t Understand the US Educational System Until You Understand Poverty

There is not one banking sector. There are two — one for the poor and one for the rest of us… Many features of our society are not broken, just bifurcated. For some, a home creates wealth; for others, a home drains it. For some, access to credit extends financial power; for others, it destroys it.”

Matthew Desmond

Desmond’s arguments are heavily based in issues of ACCESS. For example, what if a person must pay rent because they cannot qualify for a mortgage? What happens if “payday loans” are the only way to make the month’s rent payment? Or if there is no possible way to make that rent payment?

Ironically, being unable to make the rent may be luckier than being able to get a “short-term” loan. Sometimes being forced to move may work out better than digging a deeper and deeper monthly financial hole. Payday loans are usually short-term loans, typically due on a person’s next payday, with variable fees and costs. These are expensive loans — especially for borrowers who cannot pay on the due date and must rollover their loan, adding interest and additional fees. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) found that “four out of five payday loans are rolled over or renewed within 14 days” — with “the majority of all payday loans … made to borrowers who renew their loans so many times that they end up paying more in fees than the amount of money they originally borrowed.” *

At a certain level of financial comfort, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that basic comfort is about access — access to funds, access to safe housing, healthy food, transportation, support services, technology, and all the small pieces that come together to shape a life and lifestyle. Access has become one of the invisible elephants in the room with us because millions of financially comfortable people in the United States never lack access. When their smart watch or laptop fails, they stop at Costco on the way to Whole Foods, gassing up their Toyota SUV while wondering if they should buy a Tesla instead.

Where does education fit into this picture? I would argue Desmond’s bifurcation permeates US schools. Poverty-tax based school funding creates a natural, inescapable bifurcation. In the interest of not writing another book, I won’t go into the many factors that contributed to the widening of the achievement gap during the pandemic — except to say I absolutely saw it coming, having lived in a district with flat screen TVs in the student lounge, with iPads, laptops, and other technology scattered across kitchens and bedrooms in my neighbor’s homes. Going virtual turned out to be fairly easy in my home district.

In underfunded districts, the road to virtual often proved tortuous and cripplingly slow. One case familiar to me: Chromebooks ordered from China did not arrive during September due to the unexpected, dramatic surge in demand for laptops. Essential technology arrived over a month late, pushed into many homes unfamiliar with that technology. Throughout the United States, urgently needed tech not in place before the pandemic remained unavailable for weeks or longer, even when districts sourced the necessary funds. New tech — like toilet paper — flew off the shelves to lucky schools who found money and cranked out purchase orders quickly enough, but much of that tech ended up on backorder. Even when the laptops finally arrived, students who were mostly unfamiliar with their new machines struggled to join online learning communities.

ACCESS — the difference between the kids with their own laptops and phones, and the kids who had been going to the computer lab at school twice a week.

The pandemic highlighted the issue of access, creating a dramatic moment in time, but that issue existed before any coronavirus swept the world. Before COVID, we had middle school and high school kids hanging out in fast food parking lots to gain access to the internet so they could complete school assignments. We had kids using their parents’ phones to get information for web search assignments. We had kids walking through unsafe neighborhoods to get to libraries to use techology that was never going to be inside their own bedrooms — kids who felt lucky to even have a bedroom, since past experience had shown them that a warm, safe place to sleep could not always be relied upon. From the USA Department of Education: “In the 2020–2021 school year, around 1.1 million public school students, or 2.2% of all enrolled students, were identified as experiencing homelessness.” **

The actual definition of homelessness can be tricky and homelessness often comes and goes. But without nitpicking on numbers, it’s worth stopping to think about childhood bedrooms. Bedrooms can change quickly. They can also disappear.

Eduhonesty: We will never fix the achievement gap until and unless we equalize access to education. Inequitable school funding necessarily results in inequitable educational access. Any cure for our bifurcated US education system demands that we look at access — access to tech, the written word, teachers, and supportive paraprofessionals, as well as access to reasonable class sizes, tutoring, a safe learning environment, and necessary remedial education, among other concerns which affect learning.

Equitable funding will not be equal funding. The fact is — financially disadvantaged districts don’t just need the same amount of money as the rich district up the road. To equalize access, those disadvantaged districts require more money. Property-tax based school funding works directly against educational justice, as funds get distributed based on neighborhood wealth, rather than a realistic assessment of the educational requirements of our children.

IF I WERE TO PICK A HILL TO DIE ON IN TODAY’S EDUCATIONAL REFORM EFFORTS, I WOULD CHOOSE THIS ONE: WE HAVE TO SCRAP THE CURRENT PROPERTY-TAX-BASED US SCHOOL FUNDING SYSTEM. This system guarantees inequitable access by definition. Those who have, get, and those who don’t are sometimes still sitting in fast food parking lots.

*https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-finds-four-out-of-five-payday-loans-are-rolled-over-or-renewed/

** https://nche.ed.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Student-Homelessness-in-America-2022.pdf

Poverty by Profession

I recommend the book “Poverty by America” by Matthew Desmond.

The first quote that made me pause the book deserves to be shared: “A third of Americans live without much economic security working as bus drivers, farmers, teachers cashiers, cooks, nurses, security guards, social workers. Many are not officially counted among the poor but what then is the term for trying to raise two kids on $50,000 a year in Miami or Portland? What do you call it when you don’t qualify for a housing voucher but can’t get a mortgage either? When the rent takes half your paycheck and your student loan debt takes another quarter?… As a lived reality, there is plenty of poverty above the poverty line.”

What do you call it? I’d call it a reason to avoid certain careers. Or a reason to choose your location to teach with a tremendous amount of care. The range in teachers’ salaries is not nearly as wide as the range in housing prices from area to area. Teachers make an average starting salary of $35,766 in Iowa, with an overall average salary of $55,443.* Iowa has a Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI) of $211,054,** making it the seventh most affordable state for housing. In Oregon, that average starting teacher salary is $35,534 with an overall average of $61,631. The ZHVI for Oregon, however, is $498,558.

Teachers frequently fall into that category that Desmond laid out — poverty above the poverty line. The poverty line is an arbitrary line drawn by a ratio of resources to salary. Today’s current poverty threshold for an individual, according to healthcare.gov, is $14,580, a number that climbs to $30,000 for a family of four. In many parts of this country, teachers are among the working, not-quite-officially poor. Or they are avoiding falling into that category by commuting hours each day. You can work in San Francisco or Seattle. That doesn’t mean you can live there.

Eduhonesty: What do you call it when you can’t live where you work? When you can’t feed your own children on the money that you bring home? I’ll suggest readers journal the first answers to these questions that come to mind.

I’d call the above numbers a reason to organize, quit, change careers, or move. Those districts that don’t pay enough for teachers to afford housing or family vacations? They don’t deserve their teachers. We have entered the teacher shortage I predicted. That makes 2023 a great time to vote with your feet.

*Teacher Salaries in America, niche.com

**Zillow.com

When the Check Engine Light Glows Red

The above question just screams teacher at me, especially as we flail away at the COVID gap. How is your health, teacher? How is your stress level? Do you think that stress level is going to improve?

I am going to assign what might be the first homework of a nearly 10-year-old blog. Write your best five paragraph essay explaining why your stress level is going to improve. What is about to change for the better? Then read what you wrote and ask yourself if you honestly believe your essay.

If you can’t write this essay because you don’t expect teaching life to improve, you may write an alternative essay. I’ll leave that topic more open. Perhaps, “how I am going to survive teaching?” Or “the long-term effects of stress on physical and mental health.” Yes, that sentence leads to a five pound book, not a five paragraph essay, but the essay will be a start. Maybe two essays, one on physical effects of stress and another on mental effects?

Eduhonesty: Too many of us act like we get to walk away from our choices in the long-run — and sometimes we do. But I lost a friend this week. Her choices caught up with her in the form of a massive stroke, just as she reached the traditional retirement age.

This post is not for the many teachers who love their positions, the teachers with helpful, supportive administrations, and a clear sense of fulfillment in their calling. You all rock and obviously your check engine light is probably fine, or at least unaffected by your work.

But if daily work stress feels overwhelming — for whatever reason — stop the car! Pull off to the side of the road. Take this summer to find a better position in a more supportive school. Or even make a huge leap and find an alternative vocation. Go back to school to change careers if you have to. Summer is your chance to reset your light and your life. Don’t let the summer of ’23 slip away.

Please share this with struggling colleagues. Hugs to all my readers,

Jocelyn Turner

When One in Nine Children Lives in Poverty

Big numbers, little numbers, numbers taken out of context, because facts like my title are always taken out of context. It’s not like you can walk a neighborhood and put an “X” on every ninth door. My home district’s middle school claims 0% poverty, with the high school at 4.1% poverty. The high school in the district from which I retired stands at 100% poverty.

Poverty overwhelms us. Unsurprisingly, we tend to duck the issue. Or pick around it in random bits and pieces. Tent cities bad. Panhandlers bad. Government response bad. Lack of government response bad. Immigrants probably bad except maybe the ones with jobs who pay taxes.

I stumbled on an interesting example of what I just wrote recently. While listening to “Promoting Mental Health Among Children and Youth,” a webinar with US Senator Edward J Markey and US Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy, I was struck by the ABSENCE of the very idea of poverty.

I support Markey’s bill, designed to protect the privacy and mental health of young people. Advertising targeted to youth and online privacy should be central topics of public discussion. Social media has created a toxic environment, especially for our girls, that easily spirals out of adolescent control.

Markey and Murthy are to be applauded for promoting a national conversation on high mental illness rates in today’s kids. The numbers are staggering.* “In 2021, 30% of female high-school students said they had seriously considered suicide during the year leading up to the survey, while about 24% had made a suicide plan, 13% had attempted suicide, and 4% required medical care related to an attempt. Among boys, those percentages were about 14%, 12%, 7%, and 2%, respectively. And while the percentage of high-school boys who said they had contemplated suicide increased only modestly from 2019 to 2021, the rate increased significantly among girls: from 24% to 30%.”

Again, nearly one in three adolescent girls considered taking their lives in 2021.

Markey and Murthy told us many more school counselors and mental health therapists are needed. Teachers already know that. Many parents must surely be aware that mental health services are failing to keep up with demand. Markey and Murthy emphasized that kids must be taught how to handle conflict, a skill we are not systematically teaching. Our students must learn to handle the ubiquitous challenges of social media. The webinar centered on wanting to maximize social media benefits to kids while minimizing harms. Murthy stressed the importance of attacking the stigma associated with mental illness, making it easier for kids and others to admit they need help. The webinar also strayed into other issues, such as problems related to reimbursement for telehealth.

But Markey and Murthy bypassed the issue of poverty. The topic of equity did not enter until 11:39, over an hour into the discussion, when a young woman in the audience brought up the topic. Equity is all about poverty. Poverty underlies a great many of the issues the two men discussed; social inequities are steeped in financial causes and effects.

Yet beyond praising the young woman for her question, no one touched poverty.

I love the idea of a digital marketing bill of rights for teens, of banning targeted advertising to children and erasing those kids’ data. At the webinar’s end, though, I was left with a sense of a dragon hiding in plain sight. All of the issues in that webinar were affected by financial wherewithal — or the lack of it.

At the end of the day, what forces have inspired that 30% of female high-school students to seriously consider suicide? How is possible that 1 in 25 required medical care related to an attempt? Flash bulletin: The 1 in 50 boys requiring medical help after suicide attempts should not just disappear because of their lower rate of suicide attempts, either. According to statista.com, in 2019, approximately 21.05 adolescents between 15 to 19 years of age lived in the US. That breaks down to around 10.5 million boys, which translates to 210,000 young men requiring medical help after suicide attempts, and that number does not include younger boys.

Here’s a last, sobering connection that the webinar missed:

From an article in US News and World Report: https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2020-01-27/higher-poverty-tied-to-increased-youth-suicide-risk-study-shows (Gaby Galvin January 27, 2020):

“Young people are more likely to die by suicide in high-poverty communities, a new study indicates.

Youth suicide rates have climbed in the U.S. in recent years, and the new study, published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, examines where young people may be most at-risk. The analysis of nearly 21,000 deaths over a decade shows that in U.S. counties with poverty rates of at least 20%, people 5 to 19 years old were 37% more likely to die by suicide than people in counties where less than 5% of residents lived in poverty.”

I don’t want to put down Markey and Murthy’s efforts. Social media seldom makes kids feel MORE connected. Instead, it tends to foment FOMO — the Fear of Missing Out. Often it makes adolescents feel worse about themselves as they inevitably make comparisons. They see their friends out having fun, going to places where they are not included. Friends, acquaintances and others who have somehow been “friended,” may appear to be living nearly perfect lives. If Senator Markey wants to try to wrestle the social media dragon, he has my full support.

But I thought I’d put this out to readers because I think it’s a perfect example of how we overlook the dragon in the room. Something about money makes people’s eyes glaze over. The dragon’s just too huge. Markey and Murthy take on anorexia and bulemia, but leave pure hunger alone.

Fighting dragons can be messy, but we owe it to our kids to put on our dented armor and pick up our chipped and battered lances.

https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/sg-youth-mental-health-social-media-advisory.pdf

*https://time.com/6275975/teenage-girls-suicidal-thinking-2021/

And I Took It for Granted…

This will be short. How messed up has US education become when I am filling in for a middle school math teacher and the principal checks to see if I know what a reciprocal is? When she wants to know if I can reduce fractions? The fact that an adult is not automatically assumed to possess these skills is a damning commentary on today’s educational landscape.

Yet I thought the principal was perfectly sensible and within her rights to do that quick check.

Miss S****’s Non-Lesson Plan: Rescuing the Subs

(Adapted from my notebook that I walk around with when subbing, because children tend to behave better if you are writing in a notebook, even if you are just scribbling down your grocery list.)

“Children help but I have no clue how the math game works. We are lost together. Many children help. We cannot make the math game work. Technology run amok. Or simply lacking explanations and guideposts.

You cannot fool me. There’s no possible lesson here. Abandoning ship and closing the laptops.”

Eduhonesty: I’m good at making the plan up as I go, but I prefer to look like I have some idea what I am doing. Toward that end, I recommend the simple paper lesson plan. The above lesson blew up when the math game did not work, and we had no fallback position.

Subs sometimes have trouble even getting into the school internet. School security is ubiquitous and not always well aimed. On top of that, I don’t know Claire’s password. When Claire forgets that magic word, what then?

I strongly recommend a batch of hard copy, paper review questions be available, along with a box of those mini golf pencils. I recommend one batch for the whole class, along with a set of random, single review questions. This solves the cannot-make-the-math-game-work problem and can be used when Fred insists he has forgotten his password and therefore cannot do anything and so should just go to the gym instead.

Wednesday’s Child — One Thread in a Sprawling Timeline

“I’m not sure whose twisted idea it was to put hundreds of adolescents in underfunded schools, run by people whose dreams were crushed years ago… but I admire the sadism.”

Wednesday Addams

I loved “Wednesday,” a short series of eight episodes, four of them directed by Tim Burton.* Episode one opened with Wednesday protecting her brother from bullying classmates, beginning with the comment on sadism above, reality thick on the ground. Kudos to the episode’s writers for sharing a truth that hits close enough to the bone to make those middle school and high school corridors both menacing and somehow funny.

I laughed anyway. Packed into those thirty words I catch a glimpse into millions of struggling, young lives. And not-so-young lives. I see so much irony — fiercely dedicated professionals struggling to help children realize their dreams, even as they crush each other’s dreams. Just how many pages are in that evaluation rubric? What are the odds that all those line items on those pages will actually be observed? If a category is not observed, what are the odds that a number (1= excellent, etc.) will be inferred? Administrators tend not to leave blanks. Sometimes, I’m pretty sure we are not in the category of “inference” at all. Try “wild guess” instead.

What’s up with that? What’s up with the combative, sometimes punitive atmosphere in many schools today? We talk teams. We talk talk talk teams, but I remember an extremely capable young colleague who cried so loudly when she got her rubric results that I could hear her in my room below. After a bit, I went up to join the crowd consoling her, as she said things like, “Well, maybe I just wasn’t cut out to be a teacher. I guess I should look at what else I can do.”

Meanwhile, we give kids all these tests that many of them cannot do, seeking to get data that often goes unused SINCE ANY TEST THAT KIDS CANNOT DO GIVES DATA THAT WISE PEOPLE DO NOT TRY TO USE. And let’s not forget the emotional impact of effectively failing test after test.

Sadism at its finest.

*The second season has been given the thumbs up, although we won’t see more of Wednesday in the near future.