(Continuing posts especially for newbies)

Soccer season has begun in many places. Students are running back and forth across fields, while parents pull lawn chairs out of vans or sit on metal bleachers. Friends of players are sitting on the sidelines, sharing Gatorades and squiggly, red chips.

Are you sitting in your classroom grading? Or trying to figure out your new grading program? Do yourself a favor. Take a blanket or chair out to the sidelines. Watch Ozzie run after that ball. Cheer a little for your students. Or cheer a lot. Nothing will garner more goodwill in the classroom than a few well-placed cheers and the ability to greet Ozzie tomorrow by saying, “I could not believe that last kick! The goalie never had a chance.”

(A post for newbies.)
With luck, you can lock your desk drawers. I think I had one key for one desk in the last ten years, though. Those keys get lost and school districts don’t often have money for more desks. I hardly ever had closet keys. Last year, I got by with padlocks and chains.

If you can’t lock up all your important supplies, yelp and keep yelping. Turn in whatever forms your district requires. Follow up on those forms. In the meantime, find functional chains and padlocks. Talk to security. If all else fails, talk to your Principal. (Don’t bother your Principal, however.) I finally got a key to lock my classroom door one year when I told my Principal about my clever plan for an emergency lockdown, the plan where all my students fled out the two windows that opened, running to a district elementary school about one-half mile away. If you want to try the crazy-lockdown-plan to get your door fixed, you have my permission.

You must be able to secure your items and valuable school supplies. I learned that as a new teacher when I left a small group in my classroom after school and went to my car to pick up snacks. Those were great girls and a couple of them are now young adult Facebook friends. Still, while I was gone, they went into my desk and stole money from a change bag I kept. The next day, the group confessed, crying and apologizing for a crime that I might have never even noticed if no one had said anything. That event taught me a lesson, though. Even the best kids can succumb to temptation.

I’ll add to that lesson. Don’t let anyone go into your desk. Period. Only you should remove items from your desk. The problem with letting trustworthy Richie go into your desk arises later, when other classmates interpret Richie’s opening of your desk drawer as a more general permission to go into your desk. No student should ever pull out a drawer from your desk, a rule that needs to be explicitly clear from the beginning. Desk drawers are off-limits.

One last piece of advice: Never set your phone down anywhere, anytime. Don’t charge the phone at school. I suggest women get a small bag to wear during the day, keeping phones inside when not in direct use.
Kipling makes small bags that work wonderfully.

Eduhonesty: I’m sure some readers are baffled by this post. They had those locks in place a week before school started. But new teachers have so many small details to manage that locks and anti-thievery measures may fall off the radar.

I think back to my search for a phone a few years ago. The new phone had been a birthday present from a first-year teacher’s husband and she had only had the phone for a little over a month, before setting the phone down briefly while moving classrooms. That soft-spoken, beautiful, young African-American woman looked so sad. I remain convinced that at least a couple of my students knew what had happened to the phone, but no one ever discovered the culprit. I tried, adding my questions to those of other adults, but not one of the student movers ever admitted to seeing anything.

I hope I made the responsible party feel guilty anyway.

(Another post that may be especially helpful for newbies.)

My last post about PARCC testing and the failure to release PARCC results speculates that the majority of America’s students failed that test. We will know sooner or later. They may change the passing score to fix the problem.

Shifting back from big-picture to daily life, though, I feel I ought to address the problem of the test or quiz that most or all of the class fails. When I first started teaching, that problem seldom impacted my life. I was writing my own tests and quizzes based on what I had taught. Students had seen and worked with the material. They seldom failed.

You may not be writing your own tests and quizzes, though. You may be forced to teach to tests and quizzes that somebody else wrote for you. You may get those tests and quizzes a week or less before you are required to administer them. That’s what happened to me last year. The fail rate went through the roof and I was doing damage control and test retakes all year. But that’s another story. Maybe.

Whether you wrote the test or not, if most students failed, you can’t simply move on. Further, you have to acknowledge a truth that seemed to elude my administrators last year: You just gave a bad test. Tests or quizzes that fail everyone don’t provide much information about what students know and they discourage future efforts, especially on the part of those who studied. If you worked three hours the night before to get ready and got clobbered, will you work three hours next time? Where’s the pay-off?

For purposes of this post, I am going to assume you are writing your own tests. You wrote and gave your test. The scores came in ranging from low to abysmally bad.

Here are some tips:

You probably need to reteach. If your district has a tightly-scripted curriculum and you don’t see available time to reteach, look at the subject matter. You may be able to move on from the history of astronomy. Your students won’t suffer across the years from their lack of knowledge of Tycho Brahe. Curve the test, start on the next topic and don’t look back.

But if you were teaching two-step equations, you must reteach. Your students require this knowledge to go forward in algebra and other math classes. In a curriculum time-bind, try to find before and after school tutoring time. Reserve at least part of the class block for vital, as-yet-confusing topics like those two-step equations.

Make sure your teaching aligns to your test. Any topic you test, you should have specifically taught. No student should ever see new material on a test. That’s the problem with borrowing tests or using older tests from past years. Even if those tests prove mostly appropriate, they often contain an idea or two that the class never explored.

If you have to borrow a test in a time crunch, go through that test and eliminate problems that don’t fit well with previous instruction. In an extreme time crunch, when you can’t go through the test, allow students to drop a number of problems of their choice.

If you taught a topic but tests and quizzes show confusion, admit you don’t know how to get the idea over the plate yet. If teaching was a cookie-cutter job, they could make robots to spew out preprogrammed information. They can’t. There’s no disgrace in not knowing how best to teach a topic. We all learn by doing. The research indicates that first- and second-year teachers underperform their more experienced colleagues. Well, duhh. It takes time and effort to learn what works. Ask more experienced colleagues for help. What do they do? What works for them?

Steal lesson plans off the internet* if no one in school can help you. Use lectures on YouTube to explain a process differently when you can find quality material. Some kids listen more attentively to strangers on a screen, and a fresh take on a topic may reach learners who need extra reinforcement.

I have been known to apologize when tests went badly awry. If almost everyone failed, and I wrote the test, then I mishandled my topic or process somewhere. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with owning that failure. If I took the test from the book, but students studied the lectures, I should have warned them to study their textbook. If I assumed students knew a topic because they did a good drawing of the process, but I didn’t check beyond that to discover that most of those projects were copied off phones or home computers, I didn’t do enough pre-test assessment.

I strongly suggest test retakes be available to students. If grades fall too low, some students give up.

Allowing students to substitute projects for make-up tests can work well with many topics. Certain students learn better when they can pull out the colored pencils and markers.

As a last resort, if most or all of the class failed a test or quiz, reserve the right to throw that test out entirely, substituting a project to teach necessary concepts. Instead of testing scientific method, have your class prepare a PowerPoint or write a paper detailing the scientific method. A test that pulls down the whole class’s average benefits no one.

*Perhaps I should say borrow. If you do borrow, please give credit. When you change materials, share credit. I would write “By Sally Smith, adapted by Ms. Q” on such presentations. Giving credit for borrowed materials conveys a quiet lesson to students. We have too great a problem with plagiarism already.

Computerized test results are supposed to be fast. Results from the ACT go out in three to eight weeks, for example. Most ACT results can be viewed online within two weeks.

According to the PARCC website, Arkansas, Colorado, District of Columbia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, and Rhode Island took the PARCC test last spring. Dates varied from school to school, with some schools finishing in March. New York City also conducted a pilot program with 5,000 students in 25 schools. Where are the PARCC results?

Some districts suffered from large technological glitches. Those glitches no doubt explain some of the reporting problem. But we are still at least three months out now, in some cases four, and counting. I suspect that part of the problem rests in the results. I suspect PARCC has failed almost all the students in the country and Pearson/PARCC leadership has been working furiously, but without success, to try to figure out how to spin this mess.

(Returning to the homework thread for newbies and anyone else who cares.)

A few posts back, I suggested that teachers who were not getting homework back should check to see if the homework’s level of difficulty might be the culprit. Especially if you are not creating your own homework, that homework may be based in an administration’s view of where students ought to be at, rather than where those students are actually operating. While some children who can’t do their homework will seek help, many will not. Adolescents especially may simply stuff offending papers in their locker and go home to play Call of Duty Ghosts™ with friends.

Let’s say that students overall seem able to do that homework, though. They simply did not do it. What’s the next step?

Asking students never hurts. You might have them write a paragraph explaining why they did not do their homework. Did they forget about their homework? Were they too busy with other homework? Were they babysitting siblings? Out with their parents at a baseball game? Did they start gaming with friends and never stop? Did they spend the evening on social media? Did they decide that one assignment was unimportant? That all their assignments were unimportant?

My school last year made homework grades virtually irrelevant in the larger scheme of things. Those grades counted for 0% of a report card grade. Report card grades were taken entirely from tests and quizzes. Frankly, I don’t think I would have done homework in those circumstances. I know one of my daughters did not do homework in a high school math class when that homework only counted for 5% of the grade. She figured she could do without that 5% and still get her “A”. (She’s in a doctoral program in math now.) One major reason for homework completion that could be affecting your class: Students don’t think the homework will affect their grade. Or affect their grade enough.

We were involved in a funny fiction last year. Teachers were pretending that homework counted as part of final grades but, in fact, a student could do no homework without losing points toward their final grade. We had been instructed to give homework a 0% weighting in the weighted average that resulted in the final grade. We were allowed to bump students up if they came within 2% of the next grade, but we were not required to do so. That bump was discretionary.

An example may help may this clearer. Using the standard grading scale in which 90% to 100% is an “A”, 80% to 90% is a “B”, and 70% to 80% is a “C”, I had the option to push Maggie from a “C” to a “B” when her overall average amounted to 78%. I could choose to leave Maggie at a “C” if I chose. Homework completion was expected to be part of my decision. If Maggie had been turning in most or all of her homework, she would presumably be bumped up to the next grade. Homework had some effect, but only in the margins.

The school had a plan in place to encourage homework completion. Students who failed to do work could be “zapped” and sent to an afterschool program where they would finish their homework. That program encouraged homework completion — but not homework quality. Zapping was also a fair amount of work, especially when calls home were added to the picture. You can’t keep students after school without warning parents.

I’m cynical enough to suspect that some teachers might have assigned less homework after awhile in order to avoid zapping students. Other teachers shifted homework to classwork, starting and even finishing the work during the class period. Because we had block scheduling, that strategy had a fair amount to recommend it. Teachers could see students going off-course and correct problems on the spot.

Oops, drifting into history here. If you are a new teacher, you don’t need my history. You could probably use advice. If your school has decided to use mastery-based grading with limited or no weight being given to homework, your school has given students an excuse not to do homework. How will you get that homework back then?

You can use classroom incentives. Hand out a treat or treat coupon in return for homework: Ten coupons equals an Ironman™ eraser, five are good for three Jolly Ranchers™. I have gotten a lot of mileage from Jolly Rancher coupons. I suggest coupons, with candy handed out at the end of the day.

Praise good efforts lavishly, as long as you are not embarrassing students. Watch your students’ reactions. Some kids love to be the center of attention. Others loathe it. You can praise shy students one-on-one. Let students know you appreciate their efforts.

Start homework in class. If a student expects homework to be fast and easy, that homework has a greater chance of being completed. A head start makes homework seem more doable.

Emphasize the importance of homework in the learning process. How do students file knowledge in long-term memory? They work with that knowledge. The more points a student plots on the graph, the more likely that student will remember how to plot points when given graph paper the following year. A short lesson about short-term and long-term memory, combined with critical thinking questions, may work for you, at least with some students. Do doctors need to remember many facts about diseases to do their jobs? Can they just look up diseases on their phones? How can they remember the symptoms of diseases?

Call home. Depending on your students’ ages and homework loads, you might create a homework log for parents to check nightly. If students write down the homework in a log and parents check that log, homework completion should go up considerably.

Try to give homework regularly. If you don’t want to give homework daily, then try to create a routine. If students know they always have a weekly packet to do, that packet is more likely to get done. You can ask at the start of class, “How are your packets going? Are there any questions?” Then give coupons for good questions. You might establish a time at the start of class specifically for questions.

Good luck with this piece of the teaching puzzle. Again for new teachers, don’t take homework completion problems personally. Perhaps Mr. Smith last year never cared if the homework came back. Homework completion will be heavily affected by both history and peer behavior.

I keep intending to get back to the homework thread for new teachers, but having added a chart from the Illinois state interactive report card that shows some score adjustments made between 2012 and 2013, I thought I would add two other charts demonstrating the impact of this change in scoring.

These results are from a middle school in northeastern Illinois. If you will click on the above chart documenting passing levels in reading on the Illinois State Achievement Test (ISAT), you will discover that the percentage of students meeting or exceeding reading expectations fell from 63% to 26% in 8th grade, and 55% to 20% in seventh grade between 2012 and 2013. I like how the chart adds 17 + 2 to get 20, but I assume that’s an issue of decimals I cannot see. Of note, almost no students exceeded expectations. In some years, none did.

In math, scores fell from 43% to 17% for eighth graders between 2012 and 2013, and made a whopping descent from 61% to 16% in seventh grade. For the years 2013 and 2014, no students exceeded expectations in math in either grade.

These charts raise many questions. They should also raise flags. We are deciding teacher and administrator retention based on these numbers. But what are these numbers? Where do they come from? The fact that a school can change in one year from a passing rate above 1 in 2 to a rate of 1 in 5 speaks volumes about the social-science numbers we are using to document school performance, an issue that too seldom hits the radar. Illinois has a number of other states for company in the production of these volatile and suspicious passing rates. Who sets the passing rate for a state? The state does.

And, on another subject that I consider closely related to this one, who determines the score on a teacher’s evaluation? Evaluations are not “grievable” — which is to say that the union cannot help you if Fred decides to slam your performance. The problem of subjective administrators handing out personally picked numbers ought to receive more public attention. At least the ISAT numbers are based on standardized tests given across a state and should allow for reasonable comparisons between schools. Fred is just making up numbers in his office.

Eduhonesty: The larger problem I see is that we are drowning in fuzzy, social science numbers. Our data and its interpretation are presented as if the numbers represent reality. All I can say is, look at these charts. Which is reality? 2012? 2013? They can’t both be true — not in any objective sense anyway.

The stated goal of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is to “support innovation that can improve U.S. K-12 public schools and ensure that students graduate from high school ready to succeed in college.” College readiness has become a rallying cry for educational reformers. Educational administrators know that their positions may hinge upon convincing parents and higher-ups that their particular programs are improving college readiness.

But what does it mean to improve college readiness? When the verbiage is stripped away from reports on this issue, what remains tends to be lists of test scores: ACT and SAT scores, state test scores, PARCC scores*, EXPLORE scores, MAP scores, AIMSWEB scores, ACCESS scores, and other scores are all used to document progress toward college readiness.

Educational leaders keep spinning their stories, finding the data that supports their case and continued employment. If a district takes enough tests, some positive data will emerge. The other data tends to become footnotes in reports.

Unfortunately, scores are not readiness. Scores are not innovations that improve schools. Score not only do not ensure that students graduate from high school ready to succeed in college, they may keep students out of the colleges of their choice. In and of themselves, scores may even be anti-college readiness. The pursuit of scores took around 10% of my last school year, time that might otherwise have been dedicated to instruction.

The meaning of scores may not be straightforward, either. A review of middle school scores in the Illinois state report cards for the years 2012 to 2013 shows a precipitous drop in score results. The state obviously changed how scores were calculated between those years. Scores fell almost across the board – and many school scores fell over 30 points. For example, North Boone Middle school fell from 82% to 51% meeting and exceeding requirements. The whole state fell 23 percentage points.

From the Illinois interactive report card, http://iirc.niu.edu/Classic/School.aspx?schoolId=040042000261001.

We are not exactly inventing numbers but we are not presenting enduring truths either.

Yet the solutions presented for our numerous, complex educational challenges seem to mostly involve new and better test preparation methods designed to get higher scores. I am reminded of the joke about the man looking for his car keys:

A cop walking his beat one night finds a man down on his knees, searching for something on the street.
“What are you doing?” The cop asks.
“Looking for my car keys,” says the man.
The cop helps him look for awhile without success, then says, “Think back. Where were you when you last had your keys?”
“I don’t know,” the man answers. “Down the block on the other side over there, I think.”
“Then, why are you looking here?” the perplexed cop asks.
“Because the light is better under the streetlight,” the man answers.

This hackneyed joke fits today’s educational climate perfectly. Current strategies usually involve forming committees and discussing the problems that are keeping test scores down – without regard to whether or not test scores are actually the problem. These groups then brainstorm ways to improve test scores. No one asks whether raising test scores is the best or right strategy. We are told the higher test scores are necessary to prepare students for college. We are told that all students must be made college ready.

Rather than forming multiple committees and launching into lengthy debates about where the test went wrong, though, and why not all of our students are ready for college, I know what we ought to try first: Take 20 students at random from a failing school and have each student try to read one page of their science book aloud. Then check for understanding. A lot of students can pronounce words that are pretty much nonsense syllables to them. Repeat this page-reading exercise in other subject areas. This is so basic I feel stupid writing it down, but many people who ought to be smarter seem to miss a large point nowadays: If you can’t even understand the simplest paragraphs in your textbook, learning new material becomes hard — or even impossible.

Students who cannot understand their books are not going to succeed in college, no matter how many points we add to their scores.

*Except the PARCC scores still don’t seem to be back. Where are those numbers? I suspect the fail rate was so high that the persons responsible for this test can’t find any way to spin the results.

My September 2nd post on drop-out rates is long. If you don’t want to reread that whole post, I certainly understand, but I have made a number of clarifying additions to what I wrote. If nothing else, I would suggest reading the new ending.

From Randi Weingarten:
When Chris Christie said that our union deserves “a punch in the face,” I was appalled but not surprised. When Scott Walker compared union members in Wisconsin to members of the terrorist organization ISIS, I was disappointed but not shocked.

In unity,
Randi Weingarten
AFT President

Eduhonesty: I remain baffled by attacks on unions. A small percentage of substandard teachers may have received extra protection from being fired because they were tenured union members. But the fact that I have healthcare, a pension and a living wage — that’s the union. Far too many Americans today are living paycheck to paycheck, unable to quit working and terrified at the prospect of getting sick. We need to fight for our unions. While we are at it, we should also help service industry workers and others to unionize. Too many of my students parents’ are working two part-time jobs with no health insurance in order to meet ends meet.

I listen to Chris Christie and Scott Walker and I am absolutely sickened. Teacher-blaming has to stop.

(Another post especially for newbies in challenged and challenging districts with a few thoughts for us all.)

So you are part of a Professional Learning Community (PLC) in your school. Your school has developed a curriculum for all to use and your PLC is busy creating lessons to use across your grade. All the science teachers are sending home that same fill-in, homework sheet on solids, liquids and gasses. You explain the assignment and send everyone out the door with that homework, hopefully after reminding them to put the sheet in their folder and their folder in their backpack where they can find it.

The next day, five kids bring back the finished homework. Twenty-two do not. Most have not started, but some did a few problems. A number have no idea where that homework has gone. What to do next?

Extending the due date is a bad idea. Unless a tornado passed through the area and cut off power, or another cataclysmic event occurred, the kids just blew off your assignment. They can’t earn a reward like an extension for that behavior.

Getting upset with the class probably should be a last resort, too, unless you are positive that the class could all do that worksheet. If you know without doubt that your homework was doable, raising a little hell is a perfectly acceptable option. So is calling home to enlist parents in getting the homework done.

I am going to suggest that you try something else first, though. Make another set of that worksheet. Then give students that sheet in class during testing conditions. No talking, no sharing, no helping. See if your students can actually do that homework by themselves while using their textbook. If they can’t do the work, that homework should never go home.

You are establishing habits at the start of the year. Homework helplessness leads to homework noncompliance, a habit inimical to long-term student success. If you absolutely must use the your group’s required assignments, but you know students cannot do these assignments on their own, start the assignments in class as classwork. Do the toughest problems while you are present to help. Then send home the easiest problems to finish.

You can’t let students begin regularly skipping homework. The homework habit has to be established early in the year. But as a previous post observed, students who cannot do the work will not do the work. (Or they will cheat.) Make sure the homework is doable. That’s the place to start.

More on this topic later.