Let me make this post less theoretical: I have a student I’ll call Ulyses. Ulyses is a quiet boy who does more of his homework than most. He reliably does his classwork. Awhile back, he turned in an assignment which noted sadly that once he had been a good student who got good grades. He’s having a rough year this year in comparison.  He’s getting mostly Cs and some Bs. I took some time to tell him he was doing fine. I have given only a few “A” grades this year, I told him, and I have appreciated his steady efforts.

Here’s the thing: I’m not sure if he started kindergarten in the U.S. and is still in bilingual classes seven years later. Some of my students started kindergarten here and are in year seven — destined at this rate to finish high school in bilingual classes unless some changes are made. But I know Ulyses has been in bilingual classes since early elementary school.

He tells me he got high grades in his bilingual classes in elementary school. My question is the following: If he was doing so well, why has he been unable to pass the English-language exit test for all these years? He isn’t even doing particularly well on the test, not well enough to qualify for part-time help. He is in full-time bilingual classes. If this boy had actually been doing well, I would have expected him to learn English.

But I believe him when he tells me he always got good grades. He’s an honest kid. What I suspect happened here is a version of what I wrote when starting this entry. I bet his teachers just kept putting positive comments on his papers, no matter how many mistakes those papers had on them. They probably wanted to avoid making him feel bad, so they avoided directly correcting many of his mistakes.

They may have intended to be kind. What they did to Ulyses was not kind, however. This is a good kid without any learning disabilities who has fallen years behind grade level despite probably having been a diligent student, especially in his earlier years. An outsider might suspect this is an example of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

The scariest part of what I’ve written: I’m not sure Ulyse’s problems have resulted from the soft bigotry of low expectations. I think I’m looking at what can happen when current educational philosophy is put into practice by people who don’t understand that if you reward crap, you will keep getting crap.

Robbie really has no idea how to do his work. He is not defensive. Just resigned. I say you need to do this. He says he does not know how.  He missed – what, half the year last year? Who knows. He stays home to help his mom, despite attempted school and county interventions. I look at him. A brief silence falls. I know he does not know what I am talking about. He has missed so much I don’t know how to fill in the gaps. I launch in to try. He looks so defeated.

“When only 3 people pass your test, that says something about your teaching.”

I absolutely agree with that kid. I sometimes make tests that are harder than I expected, (actually I regularly do this despite my best efforts) but if I ever write a test that only 3 people pass, it will probably be time to retire. The test should reflect what I taught.

And I had better have taught more than three people in the room.

The men and women over in the Administration Office need to wrap their heads around the meaning of the broken water fountains.

Message sent to the Principal of our school:

“(Mr. Principal), please make sure that your staff and students are aware that this is not acceptable. We can not afford to be repairing equipment when our budgets are as tight as they are.”

From: (Someone in the Central Office)

I am sure we cannot afford to repair these fountains.

I was here, though, for the brief period a few years ago when they shut down bathroom breaks. That sure failed. I remember vividly that one girl called her mom from the classroom of a colleague and her mom said, “Just go.” The girl went. So did everyone else in the class who wanted to go and my colleague had the choice of writing up a group of kids, with a likelihood that nothing much would happen to them, or just rolling over. She rolled. I walked upstairs at that time listening as a paraprofessional (!) explained to a student that restricting bathroom privileges violated the student’s civil rights and the student should just go if he felt like it. I took my kids in a group a few times, which was allowed, at the cost of a considerable amount of class time. I did not want to do this group activity, but some girls at certain times of the month require a little flexibility. (I’m sure the nurse was flooded with girls at this time, too, since sending girls to the nurse got around the bathroom restriction.) The restrictions did not last long since they began to suck up quantities of administrator time, as teachers were forced to write up kids for going to the bathroom.

So let’s assume we cannot keep our students out of the bathrooms. (Nor should we, obviously.) Then the next choice would be sending them with security to the bathroom. But security is pretty busy. In fact, they don’t always come when you call them. They certainly can’t be running around the school taking 14 year olds to the bathroom. That means students will actually be going by themselves to the bathroom sometimes.

And that means that vandalism will happen. A small percentage of our students create most of our disciplinary referrals, but members of that group can be hell on wheels. One thing that those Administrators who don’t work inside schools may not understand is that kids who know the system may not express their anger directly. They’ve learned not to push the adults in their lives. As a consequence, a few have become masters at the passive-aggressive comeback.

The water fountains really don’t stand a chance. More importantly, if we emphasize how upset we are at what’s happening to the fountains — the fountains will stand LESS of a chance. We will have targeted those fountains.

One of my neighbors is having trouble with a parent. The parent says my colleague is picking on her kid. She called and chewed out my poor colleague out on the phone, demanding a meeting. But all of this kid’s teachers are having trouble. Mom just doesn’t want to acknowledge that her boy is developing disturbing behaviors now that he is in 7th grade.

I do feel for some of these parents. They’ve been doing their best sometimes and until adolescence that best seemed to be working out. Call it hormones, call it what you choose, though, a number of kids decide to step off the education bus in middle school. A few do this earlier, a number do it in high school, but for most the turning point is middle school. Research documents the fact that middle school performance is an excellent indicator of college performance, research that most likely does not matter here. At this rate, this kid will never see the inside of a college.

The right parents can get some of these kids back on the education bus when they start trying to get off, although the best efforts of the most dedicated parents don’t always work. Good parents take away the game system until the grades go up and, sometimes, the grades go up. They help the school. Suspensions don’t turn into multiday vacations with Battlefield, Black Ops and Cheetos. Afternoon tutoring becomes part of the student’s schedule.

I looked at the newspaper article about the Elgin mom (see preceding entry) and my response was immediate: I felt profoundly sorry for her daughter. That girl will probably be suspended repeatedly, she’ll fall hopelessly behind, and she’ll leave school early, quite possibly to have a baby. A mom who encourages fighting sets her daughter up for all those suspensions. Most kids cannot make up the missing work because they’ve missed too much class time and too many explanations of new material. My colleague next door sends the math home to suspended kids, I’m sure, but that does little good when the kid is never there to hear how exponents work.

An Elgin mother was charged Thursday with contributing to the delinquency of a minor and aggravated battery after she drove her 16-year-old daughter to a local park so her daughter could fight another girl and even videotaped the incident, police said.

Asked for 5 discipline policies to put in place in a school district, a relatively strong student wrote this:

I will put cameras.
I will put a metal detector.
I will put a lot of security officers.
I will put police around the school.
I will put a big fence around the school.

His hypthothetical school may or may not be safe. It’s sure not very cheery. My middle school students enter through metal detectors. For years, schools in major urban areas such as Chicago have been putting those metal arches in middle schools and high schools, a fact that has caused brief flurries of discussion, discussion that fades away quickly. In post 9-11 times, we accept changes that would have seemed unthinkable a mere quarter-century ago. Security also waves a wand over my students and their backpacks as they enter.

On Friday,  we read an article about school security that led to my 5 discipline policies class opener. We talked about the article. My students told me all the ways they could get a gun into school past the metal detectors. This week I will have to share some of what I learned with the administration: No more letting them get away with, “It’s just my cell phone” when asked why the wand went off over their backpack as they walked into the building.

I hope any replacement board will not make sweeping changes until they really understand what is happening. For example, a vertical curriculum is not a quick fix. No fix is a quick fix when so many students are years behind grade level. The temptation to replace principals and others can be strong once scores have fallen so low. But I am convinced that part of the reason for this district’s low scores is precisely those personnel changes. Historically, when someone did well working in a school here, they were often moved to another school with more problems. Turnover has been far too high and has created its own problems. Improvements require teamwork and teams take time to build.

So we are more than 3/4 through the school year now. I have a student I’ll call Fernando. Fernando came into 7th grade with a big smile and a friendly, helpful attitude. He proceeded to do almost no work whatsoever. Another teacher tested his reading for me. He tested at the 1st grade level. We took the MAP test. He tested at the 2nd grade level.

Aha! He had missed the Special Education Boat! I discussed this with a colleague. We agreed. We were going to start special education paperwork after he had been in System 44 for awhile, our reading program that teaches phonics. The idea was that we could use System 44 as proof of Fernando’s need for help, documentation from a state-approved intervention that the boy needed help. (It is extremely hard to get someone into special education for reasons not worth posting here. Multiple meetings and documentation of multiple interventions are needed.)

Here’s the problem: I think Fernando may be learning to read. I did very little on this, I’m ashamed to say, assuming that a kid who was 6 years behind grade level just had to have some underlying problem preventing him from learning. Also, I’m not an elementary teacher. I don’t actually know how to teach phonics.

But this week we read a difficult passage I took from the internet on school disciplinary policies. The vocabulary in that piece was at least at a 7th grade level — intended for educated adults. I figured I could teach it because interest would be high, so I used it as my current event for social studies. Fernando read twice. Fernando volunteered to read. He looked at me after both paragraphs with this look that triumphantly said, “I did it!”

A few days later, I remain essentially stunned. That thing was packed with four syllable words. I won’t know until I see the homework how well he understood, but I know he is reading so much better than he did a few months ago that I’m not sure about starting that special ed paperwork. He read those paragraphs clearly and comprehensibly. He was so proud of himself, too.

In the meantime, I still don’t understand how a kid can be 5-6 years behind grade level in reading by 7th grade without having some underlying learning disability — but perhaps he doesn’t. Regardless, I feel like I made an assumption and there’s a really good chance I was wrong. I learned something this week.