I like the new principal. Upbeat, high-energy, hitting the perky-scale at a reasonably high but not toxic level, she seems motivated and carries a whiff of little-bit-crazy which Title I principals need. She’s brunette, athletic, attractive and relatively young. I sense some steel in that fine-boned backbone.

She is also my 11th principal in 9 years of teaching. I’m cheating a bit here. I worked under co-principals in two schools, the first a pair of retired guys who were working around the rule that retired educators can only work a certain number of days per year without affecting their pensions, the second a turn-around team brought in to rescue a school that frankly wasn’t broken, not for an alternative high school anyway.

Eduhonesty: I’m feeling a bit depressed this morning. I like the new Principal. I loved the previous guy, though, and he had been my principal for a remarkable four years.

We put our students and teachers through too many changes. Fixing a school’s climate takes time. Building random staff into a team takes time. I have watched the positive changes in the classrooms and hallways. Hallways have become safe and relatively orderly. Classrooms are in sync, teaching the same curriculum at approximately the same time. Educators are working together for the good of the school. My school has been making great progress. But the test numbers did not rise as demanded.

We change principals, superintendents, administration and teachers frantically nowadays to shove test numbers up. Unfortunately, all these changes themselves undoubtedly hold the desired numbers down. Consistency and an aligned curriculum can improve learning, but not if the vision of what these terms means changes on an annual basis. We will have a new system now as the Principal brings in her well-meaning reforms. I am not sure how she will impact the curriculum. I just know that all this change moves us back more often than it moves us forward, even when new administrators bring great ideas to the table.

Maybe I need to perk up. Our new Principal deserves a chance. I’ve just seen this change too many times: I’ve never yet seen any academic miracle from that change.

I am never even tempted. No matter how little sleep I’ve had, once I start presenting the new or review material to my minions, I am onstage and I am awake. On good days, I am even excited.

Eduhonesty: Teaching is much more work than most outsiders realize, but teaching can also be a lot of fun. The minions and I had a great time this week, somewhat inexplicably since we were doing physics and geometry. But I taught, they listened, and we all ate chocolate. This job has many great days. (Then there are those other days when my carefully crafted PowerPoint goes over with a resounding, perplexed-looking thud.)

The following is now a couple of years old so I feel that I can safely post it without worrying about exposing the writer. I always change names to protect the innocent. I also decline to write great posts that simply cannot be made anonymous. The exact words a child cut into his or her flesh are too revealing.

In an opening assignment, I asked students to write a paragraph. I don’t even remember the exact topic. Here was one result:

“It’s very important for a parent to pay attention to a child. My parents sometimes forget when (they) are too busy like working two jobs. I get sometimes sad and a little bit left out. I think they should spend more time with me so I could feel better and they could become better adults.”

Another student wrote about how kids might not eat and they might get sick.

Eduhonesty: I have had many immigrant students by now with parents who work during the evening and parents who work two jobs. One part-time, minimum wage may not be enough to survive, but two can get you by. A man with two full-time minimum wage jobs whose wife has at least one job can pay for a car, an apartment and the survival needs of the family. These parents often diligently inquire after the homework and may make it to student conferences to check up on their children’s progress.

I don’t have much to add to this post. But if we wonder why some school districts always seem to be struggling academically, I think this post provides part of the answer. Thirteen year olds who are feeding themselves and their siblings, taking responsibility for doing their own homework, and managing a household can easily become overwhelmed. The homework will be triaged, thrown off the task list in favor of food and laundry. “Ana” was often tired, a little girl with large, sad brown eyes who caused almost no trouble in class. Every so often I had to wake her up. If I had to guess, I’d bet she’s a mom now, barely twenty with a couple of a kids. Where Ana lives, lonely, pretty, mostly unsupervised girls usually become young mothers.

I can see readers indignantly thinking that social service agencies ought to be rescuing “Ana” and others like her. But those agencies are mostly busy managing emergencies, children in real physical danger from abuse or children who have no food in the house. “Ana” had loving parents and enough to eat. Should her parents have been home more often in the evenings? In an ideal world, the answer’s obvious, but in this world, the money for rent and groceries has to come from somewhere.

From Rob Van Aken
Yesterday at 12:57pm who took the following from
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/01/18/everything-you-need-to-know-about-common-core-ravitch/?tid=pm_local_pop

“In New York state, which gave the Common Core tests last spring, only 30% of students across the state passed the tests. Only 3% of English language learners passed. Only 5% of students with disabilities passed. Fewer than 20% of African American and Hispanic students passed. By the time the results were reported in August, the students did not have the same teachers; the teachers saw the scores, but did not get any item analysis. They could not use the test results for diagnostic purposes, to help students. Their only value was to rank students.

When New York state education officials held public hearings, parents showed up en masse to complain about the Common Core testing. Secretary Duncan dismissed them as “white suburban moms” who were disappointed to learn that their child was not as brilliant as they thought and their public school was not as good as they thought. But he was wrong: the parents were outraged not because they thought their children were brilliant but because they did not believe that their children were failures. What, exactly, is the point of crushing the hearts and minds of young children by setting a standard so high that 70% are certain to fail?”

Eduhonesty: This speaks to the heart of our mania for ever-increasing testing. Never mind that the data we get tends to arrive too late to be useful and that this data does not include information needed to plan individual instruction. I will repeat the critical question:

What, exactly, is the point of crushing the hearts and minds of young children by setting a standard so high that 70% are certain to fail?

I hated Moby Dick. I remember that book as the most tedious experience in twelve years of public education. Being a diligent student in a 9th grade honors English class, I nonetheless gutted my way through the whole testosterone-laden mess. I read about death on Kilimanjaro. I discussed how sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, which may include shooting the family dog. Shane was somewhere in there too.

In college, I complained about those reading lists. Where were the girl books? Where were the girls in the books? The single girl I can remember who was not an essentially passive mom or sister was Scout in to Kill a Mockingbird.

Eduhonesty: This is where my post takes a surprising direction. Years later, I think the local school administrators may have been picking the right books (with the exception of Moby Dick which is irredeemable in my view), given the nature of boys and girls. I am looking at an article on why Johnny won’t read. The research documents a literacy gap in our time, with girls being much more likely to become readers than boys. The article partly blames book choices that appeal to girls rather than boys. As I recall choices in my daughters’ schools, I realize that The House on Mango Street and The Memory Keeper’s Daughter are likely to have little appeal for boys. The Poisonwood Bible and Speak aren’t going to pull those boys in either. In fact, parts of those books can be expected to make boys feel extremely uncomfortable. No middle school boy should ever have to read about rape.

Our boys frequently are looking for role models in this time and while that crazy man on Kilimanjaro may not be the answer, the truth is that perhaps our book lists ought to be skewed toward the boys. The move toward nonfiction right now will help. Boys often prefer nonfiction to fiction.

In the end, my reasoning is this: My girlfriends and I all became readers despite a male-oriented set of reading lists in school. We went to the library and found our personal favorites in our free time. I read out the local science fiction section and moved on to mysteries. Some of my girlfriends devoured romance novels. But many boys may not feel as comfortable finding their niche in the library, especially after enough conversations with friends about how much they hate that book about Mango Street. If reading seems girlie, especially in this time of Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, reading may simply not happen.

At the very least, I suggest we need to be sure that choices for school reading lists are relatively gender neutral like To Kill a Mockingbird or Into Thin Air.

~ Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900), An Ideal husband, 1893

We wanted data, we got data. We post it on classroom and school walls. We stick it in computers and manila folders. My high school was using student numbers to post data until some students started using those numbers to hijack other students’ free lunches. Then we were asked to create a new set of secret codes. A plethora of acronyms are used to label data from state, national and for-profit standardized (mostly) tests.

Eduhonesty: Now that we have the data, I feel compelled to ask one question: Are we ahead? We are losing so much instructional time to create and assess this data that I would not be surprised to discovered that data-gathering efforts have resulted in declines in the very scores we are tracking. In fact, I’d put a month of the mortgage money on a bet that those scores have gone down as a direct result of time-loss from data-gathering efforts.

What if you can’t find a bilingual high school math teacher willing to work in your district? Both bilingual and high school math teachers remain in demand. The district had a long-term sub, a good one, but his credentials were expired or something. So now the students in these classes have no teacher. I guarantee the No-Teacher-for-a-Month-or-Two plan won’t work. Those classes were already grievously behind.

Eduhonesty: I don’t want to look for work, but this situation makes me understandably nervous. I happen to have the necessary high school credentials. I don’t want to teach those classes. Middle school suits me much better than high school. I prefer younger kids. I also prefer science, language arts and social studies to math. For the time being, I am safe. No one is going to disrupt my middle school classes in April by transferring me, but next year the Board will be able to redeploy me into the mathematical abyss they are creating.

These facts argue in favor of filling out the standard online application and entering the job market.

Sigh.