Teaching casts long shadows. I taught this girl six years ago now. She sat at the end of a table, sneaking in reading time, fat books unrelated to the science fiction elective that I taught at the end of the school day. I watched her read and began to buy her books. She came in and cleaned my room every so often, probably to pay me back for the books. She began coming to my afterschool groups and my class parties, that year and the following year. Mostly, I taught bilingual classes but we included this girl in our groups. I could not be happier for my new soldier, who sent me a handwritten letter, obviously written in bits at different times. Some of the handwriting looks exhausted. “The food here is tolerable,” she says, a bit after letting me know she had qualified with grenades. Your soldier, she signed the letter.

Eduhonesty: The eduhonesty blog feels too negative sometimes because I am critiquing my life in education, tracking problems such as excessive testing and meeting times. This post helps put the life of a teacher in perspective. I love this picture and the letter that came with it. I am so proud of this girl.

I watched happy kids slug down vanilla frappuccinos from Starbucks today. The Museum of Science and Industry has a Starbucks conveniently located near an elevator. I watched them share candies and flaming red snack food later. I took the below pic of a student lunch during Saturday tutoring:

Eduhonesty: Michelle Obama has taken on one big supervillain. Deliciousness can be hard to defeat.

My last post dealt with “Rick,” my union rep. We had a discussion on the merits of the new retention — or, rather, lack of retention — policy in my school. Fail or no fail, we appear to plan to pass them on to the next grade. I’m not against the policy per se. I can see a certain fairness in it. We shifted the whole ground under the kids this year. Suddenly, they had multiple tests weekly. Suddenly, outsiders set the level of those tests, without having known these students. Unreadable tests became common. Failing grades soared, including those in my own gradebook.

Eduhonesty: For this year, a blanket pass may represent justice rather than mercy.

Too much spam. I barely have time to write posts on top of grading and other responsibilities. It’s still possible to comment but no longer so easy. Sorry.

One A.M. meeting about a software program, running one hour and ten minutes. I left a little early because I needed to make copies before my next class. Total planning period time: Ten minutes! One P.M. meeting, running one hour and five minutes. The first twenty-five minutes were on the MAP test we are going to start giving to the whole school starting next week. A few minutes were also dedicated to the PARCC test, scheduled for the end of April and start of May. The remaining minutes took place in a department meeting on the topic of the AIMSWEB and MAP tests. These tests are overlapping. Some discussion revolved around the desirability of separating the tests so we don’t completely nuke students with exams. I pointed out that at least a couple of boys in my classes were likely to just start circling answers or clicking on letters randomly (depending on the test) if we did not give them some break from testing. Others agreed. The Department Chair promised to bring the issue up with the Principal. We also discussed a new plan in which teachers will go into each other’s classes to watch lessons and critique those lessons. At first, teachers will receive forewarning. Then teachers will add to the surprise visits already made by administrators and mysterious state officials. These new visits will come out of our — I laugh as I type the following words — planning time.

I spent most of my minutes in the first, afternoon meeting trying to calm a colleague, “Dana,” who is honestly frightened of all these new, computerized tests. She is afraid she will somehow mess up. Another colleague and I came up with suggestions to help “Dana” get ready, such as observing a math teacher in another grade who will begin her testing cycle first. We promised to go through the six or eight pages of instructions for the test with “Dana.” I promised to print out another, different set of instructions. I’m hoping the guy across the hall will create a cheat sheet for getting the test started. He’s good at that kind of thing.

My third afternoon meeting was cancelled due to the absence of the Department Head for that subject. That cut total meeting time down to 2 hours and fifteen minutes. With the usual third meeting, we would have spent at least one-half hour longer in the building. Meeting time might then have broken three hours.

Testing made for fractious end of day exchanges.

“We just got done fucking testing,” a usually calm and articulate colleague emoted after school.

“This is fucking ridiculous,” another usually calm colleague exclaimed to me while going downstairs between meetings.

“This is stupid,” my seat partner said to me during the last meeting.

In previous years, we had a lot less cursing. I just try to cheer everyone up.

“Nonsense,” I say, “there can never be too much testing. I love weird, new tests that take up all my instructional time.” Sometimes I say, “There can never be too many meetings! We might actually get something done.” I smile broadly. Mostly, they smile back. You might as well keep smiling. You have to keep going to meetings. Given that I plan to escape these tempestuous seas, I probably could start skipping meetings but I won’t. I feel a need to keep my hands on the oars, helping to row our little lifeboats toward happier shores.

Eduhonesty: I’ll start keeping track of the testing minutes next week. It seems I just finished that count but the cycle is about to begin anew. At this rate, in a few years we will hardly have to teach students at all. We will just spend the year testing them. Afterwards, we can conduct numerous, long meetings about how little they seem to know, suggesting strategies for fixing the situation that no one has time to implement because they are too busy testing and going to meetings.

I start to type in “sample bias worksheets” and Google obligingly offers me a few extra alternatives, doing that google-thing where it adds words to help you find common searches. The third item down is “sample bias worksheets for kindergarten” and I click on that link. There are also “sample bias worksheets for kindergarten” in images.

Eduhonesty: We can’t really be that nuts, can we?

(I went to look. It’s not that bad. Here’s a bit of food for thought, found on Google:)

The studies show that retained students do not do as well in life as those students who are socially promoted. The studies miss an important point, though — one that desperately needs to be put on the radar. We know the effect of retaining students on students retained. We have been tracking this phenomenon for decades. What we don’t know is the effect of retention on the nonretained.

What happens when students watch failing students get promoted to the next grade? That effect of retention — or lack of retention — on regular students exists, and we cannot assume the magnitude of the effect is trivial. Students watch and learn from each other. They sometimes consider consequences in making behavioral decisions. A perfect example is the Illinois Constitution test. Illinois state law requires Constitution tests in middle school and again in high school. Students must pass to move on to the next grade. I have given these tests at both the middle school and high school level. (I do have an absurd number of endorsements for readers who are trying to figure out my backstory.) In the high school, we scheduled evening study sessions in the local library. Students sprawled across the floor, sat in chairs or propped themselves up against chairs as we studied for that test. Motivation was extremely high. Bilingual and ESL students especially take this one requirement seriously because they have been told they must pass the Constitution test to graduate. No other test or even final exam generates close to the same level of effort and motivation.

Expectations affect academic effort. If students expect they must pass a Constitution test to get their diploma, they will learn the provisions of the Constitution. If students think F grades may deprive them of a chance to go on to the next grade with their peers, at least some students will put in extra effort to make sure they don’t get that F. Unfortunately, we can’t put a number to this effect. How many students have been saved from flunking because “Ramses” flunked and his friends and cousins all became more academically serious after seeing how much “Ramses” hated repeating the eighth grade?

What happens when we promote everyone to the next grade, regardless of academic effort and achievement? What is the message we just passed on to the average Joe or Joanna? Our high achievers are likely to continue to be high achievers. The research nicely documents the fact that high achievers in middle school tend to remain high achievers. But what about those students with the 2.0 GPA who write 3 sentences when 5 are expected? Who lose their pencils and books regularly but who still chug along asking for more pencils and turning in mostly finished assignments? What message do they take with them when we pass along that student who failed multiple classes?

Those lower-scoring students will get the message. The grapevine where I work functions well, in part because we have many large families. I asked a girl today about her siblings and found out she has five brothers and one sister. That’s not uncommon in my school. I always keep coloring books around for parent-teacher conferences. Many families are interconnected. We have a lot of cousins in our classrooms. Many times, I have heard students tell friends about what happened to their “cousin” (or brother, sister, etc.) who failed the previous year. If nothing happened, that information gets filed away.

There are kids who will always try and always do well. There are kids who bring so much baggage to the table that best efforts may not prevent their failing. My concern is for the kids in the middle, the kids who are savvy enough to listen to the stories of the preceding year and base their behavior on the expectations created by those stories, the kids who may let an F or two slip by because any costs or consequences from that lack of academic diligence don’t seem terribly large or important.

When we pass everyone on, we pass on a profound message that grades don’t matter much, if at all.

My kids have learned a great deal of math. The current regime sent many of them running towards tutoring, especially since no one knew the retention policy until March. I’m not saying our one-size-fits-all attack on learning failed. The kids at the top, as I have observed before, definitely benefited from more demanding instruction. So did some of the more diligent and frightened kids in the middle.

Eduhonesty: This year has not been a fail. For it to be a success, though, we are going to have to instill some enjoyment of learning and school into our students. We are going to have to give these students a sense that they are playing a game they can win. Presenting them with material too many years above their level of understanding and mastery tends to defeat that purpose. Educational policy makers need to keep in mind a simple, fundamental truth: When the game is too hard, most kids don’t play.

I walked a pile of data up to the academic coaches’ room. I talked to the three coaches there. The coaches often work late. Only I was aware of the silence, the silence that began in late October and has always filled my rooms, even as I chat about inconsequential daily events. I threw in one event of import today — my intent to try for one more special education placement — but mostly I am talkatively quiet.

One of the coaches is older. Her own silences fill the room sometimes. I sense them at the periphery, the politically incorrect things she is declining to bring out into the open. She seems quite sharp. I’ve been dropping occasional observations her way, such as the need to work on keyboarding before the PARCC test, trying to help while simultaneously avoiding conversations with my administration.

Sometimes I feel oddly ghostly.

But this environment felt toxic and ugly from the beginning of the school year and I have not changed my mind on that score. My personal rubric gives the current administration a “Needs to Improve,” bordering on the “Could We Try Robots Instead?” The robots would be kinder and quite probably more perceptive.

Perhaps I have created some of the toxicity around me. I probably needed to be more rah, rah, more Yes-We-Can-Do-It-With-Danielson! I kept being bombarded with test after required test that few, if any, of my students could actually pass. In many cases, forget passing. They couldn’t even understand the questions. Then I got slammed for their low scores. Every time people walked in, I got the positive-negative feedback, the “I love how you did this, but what about that?” which I have come to loathe. I never felt I could win, so I stopped playing — at least the politics part. I never walked away from teaching for a moment. As for me, I will teach.

It’s been a fascinating experience. I find I am empathizing with my students. We have been together in our sense of drowning this year. I am glad to be retiring.

Eduhonesty: The sobering, scary part for me is that my students can’t retire. They can drop out and I am certain some of them will. For the next few years, though, they may be hammered with test after unreadable test. I’ll hope for better. After a year in which regular, bilingual and special education students were all handed the same math and language arts tests, next year the district plans to modify materials for bilingual and special education, probably because the data showed what I expected at the outset: The kids at the bottom are not improving significantly under the current regime. You can’t learn from books and tests you can’t read.

I’d like to thank my readership for your mysterious visits to my completely unadvertised blog, which I sometimes now call the Blog of Gloom and Doom when I’m with friends. It’s been good to get this year down in words. I don’t want to let my personal silence get in the way of understanding what is happening out here. When I am done, I hope to advocate for my kids and for all the kids like them. I hope to be a voice for the drowning who aren’t being prepared for college — or anything else. We can’t keep handing these sad, lost kids books that are years above their reading levels and required tests that might as well be written in ancient Greek.

At a recent Danielson professional development (see posts around March 26th), the presenter uttered the following quote that I saved on a blue Post-It note:

“Of course, we would have a rubric so it has validity,” she said.

Statistical definition of validity: A test is valid if it measures what it is supposed to measure. In science and statistics, validity tells us how well a conclusion or measurement corresponds to the real world.

My mother’s old bathroom scale weighs in at about 6 pounds lighter than my actual weight. It’s reliable. If I step on it carefully, I’ll be six pounds lighter than I am at home. These mom-scale weights lack validity, however. The doctor’s scale matches my home scale, not my mom’s scale. In the real world, I believe the home scale provides a valid measurement of my weight. My mom’s scale does not, although I’ll confess I love to look at its numbers.

A tool by itself does not make a measurement valid or invalid. A rubric does not automatically create a valid measurement, any more than my mom’s scale with its rusty, forty-year-old springs can create that valid measurement. Any validity a tool offers proceeds from that tool’s ability to reflect the world’s ACTUAL truths.

To have rubric is to have a plan. I just whipped up the following rubric:

I just created a lousy rubric and a search on bad rubrics will turn up a fair number of funny, if pathetic, rubric examples. Do I have validity? Am I measuring student learning? What if my student wrote down four facts about Ulysses S. Grant’s favorite types of whiskey? Do I give all four points in that category? What if my student correctly used grammar and punctuation in describing Grant’s taste in whiskey? Do I give all four points? What if my student has strong artistic skills and drew the whiskey bottles beautifully, using calligraphy to lay out his facts? Let’s say the same student thinks the South won the Civil War. That yields 13 points out of a possible 16. My student has 81% — or a “B” on his project.

Eduhonesty: Rubrics are not magic. Rubrics can even be silly. They don’t have to be valid, either. Teacher Scott’s “attractive” can be Teacher Mary’s “very attractive.” Teacher Mary may give Emilia a “very attractive” because Emilia threw lots of glitter and stickers onto her project, while giving Johnny only “attractive” because Johnny didn’t add extra touches — even if both students have pretty much the same content. Does that validly reflect student learning? Using this rubric, two students with the same content could end up 3 points apart due to glitter usage. That’s 18.75% — or almost two full grades according to the standard 60-70-80-90-100% grading scale.

Validity in social science too often is in the eye of the beholder, but rubrics per se cannot and will not solve this problem. At their worst, they encourage glitter consumption rather than learning.