Any of your staff meetings leave you feeling like this?

The best thing about retirement is a sense of “done.” Done has a feel. Done has a texture. The cake is baked. Any zombies have been dismembered and burned. Done is not exactly burnt out – I still enjoy substitute teaching – but done means I can read in peace. I can write silly haikus about cooking shows or throw toffee on top of chocolate pudding pies. I can ignore the news freely and immerse myself in television shows I missed while grading, making spreadsheets, and trying to dig myself out of scary pedagogical corners. If I don’t tap the button that commits me to cover for another teacher, I can read through the middle of the night. I can turn off all the alarms.

I recommend life as a retired teacher. I recommend it especially to those working in urban and disadvantaged areas who are under constant pressure to hit impossible targets. On the one to ten scale, how stressed are you? That stress is not benign. Year after year of trying to do six impossible things before breakfast can leave you broken. Cardiovascular disease and PTSD happen even to teachers with fitness regimes.

Seriously, reader. On that one to ten scale, where are you? Are you getting near a natural breakpoint? Maybe you should find out where you stand in your state’s retirement scheme. Those later-life dollars often prove more vital than we expect, so I want to emphasize financial prudence here, but you also want to be in position to enjoy yourself when you move on to the next life-stage.

Looking back, I know I never minded the hard work I brought home, night after night, week-end after week-end. To those nonteacher readers who think teaching is an easy eight to three job with summers off, I’d like to say that someone grades all those math papers. When I did my student teaching, I discovered my cooperating teacher often stayed at her high school until 6:30 or later to get through the day’s papers. Grades must be entered in grading programs. Parent calls must be made. Emails must be answered. Meetings must be attended — before school, during school and after school. Assignments must be set up and sometimes printed. When still allowed, lessons must be planned, usually multiple versions for differing groups of students. Teachers can’t give the exact same lesson to one kid who is at grade level and another kid four years below grade level.

There’s a critical snippet of a line in the above paragraph: “When still allowed…” I kept going when my administration told me I had to give seventh-grade Common Core materials to my math classes, even though those classes were testing at an average third-grade level. I kept tutoring, even on week-ends at a McDonalds near my school, over half an hour from my home. I kept trying, and trying, and trying. But at some point, I changed. After years of telling myself, “You can do it!”, I found myself saying, “I can’t do this.” I would self-correct immediately at first. “I can too do it.” But I knew I did not believe myself.

I did not mind the work. But I did mind working stupid. My kids needed remediation that I was never allowed to provide in school and I could only get some of them to get up to get their Saturday breakfast tacos and math practice.

Eduhonesty: Are you being treated well, fellow teacher? All those hours, all that emotional investment in doing your best and doing the right thing? Do you feel appreciated? How are your self-messages sounding? Can you still say, “I can do it!” with confidence?

If your messages are beginning to sound shaky, if “can do” is being replaced with “can’t do” or even “It’s no use” or “Oh, man, what did I do this time?” – then maybe it’s time for a change. The exodus has already begun. According to the Wall Street Journal, in “the first 10 months of 2018, public educators quit at … the highest rate for public educators since such records began in 2001” — a number that translates to one million workers quitting public-education positions in 2018 according to Labor Department data. (Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/teachers-quit-jobs-at-highest-rate-on-record-11545993052, Hackman and Morath)

I regret writing this post in some ways. Many of the teachers I know who recently retired or left the field were among the best teachers I knew – creative, engaged, and knowledgeable, with terrific classroom management skills. The tally of gifted, former educators who are now selling make-up and feminine care products ought to shake this country to its core.

But the economy has been on a roll. It’s an absolutely great time to be looking for a job. That includes a different teaching position if you love your work but don’t feel the love coming back from above. Those now-former educators leaving the field are peppering the internet with online vacancies.

If you are an older teacher who regularly feels unappreciated or even under threat, and if you are at a good break point in your state retirement plan, I recommend the smartest move I made all during that last, crazy year: I turned in the necessary forms to the state and I quit.

I didn’t sleep well last night, but that doesn’t matter. I made a delicious lactose-free, 1% latte, cut a sizable piece of pumpkin pie and sat down to my computers. I plan to join a friend for lunch at The Cracker Barrel. I’ll go to a book club later this week, not the one that I started. I will pull out the yarn for another crocheting project, my fourth or fifth, depending on whether wearability counts. I believe I am ready to graduate from scarves to a more complex shape than the classic rectangle. If all else fails, a monster Star Trek puzzle waits for me in the basement. I have been planning to get back to that puzzle for months now.

If your stress level is approaching ten then, please, reader, do yourself a huge favor: PUT YOURSELF FIRST FOR A CHANGE. Only you can decide if putting yourself first means changing employment or locations, or even retiring. I would like to encourage my stressed readers to take an afternoon or a day to make a “T” chart or a larger life map to explore the possibility of moving on. You are always one decision away from changing your life. Is it time for a change?

Tougher standards have become reformers’ latest strategy to close the U.S. achievement gap. Why can’t Ginger read? We did not give her big chapter books soon enough!

I am sure one appeal of the standards movement is that it offers a simple fix for a simple problem. The fact that our simple problem may be a grossly oversimplified problem in disguise is ignored. Given the enormous costs and efforts involved in shifting classroom content, though, standards proponents should have explored one more question in depth before they leapt into the Common Core: What if we are wrong and the achievement gap only peripherally relates to classroom content?

Because if content is not central to the achievement gap then, damn! We have wasted so much money and so much time. So many bodies are looking under the streetlight on the wrong block. I am afraid that may be exactly what the standards reform movement has done.

Why do I believe more rigorous standards will not rescue us? Schools operated under their own state standards before the Common Core forced Illinois and other states to rework their many, previously-defined expectations. While going into detail about previous standards would require reams of pages filled with tiny details, I can skip those details and assert at least one fact: The old Illinois standards graduated both students ready to enter the best universities in the world, and students who couldn’t fill out an employment application or calculate a 20% tip.

Eduhonesty: I expect the same learning disparity to unfold under the Common Core, even in those states that have backed away from the Core. The standards movement and those Core–adapted standards remain. The huge gap in background knowledge and academic aptitude between students remains. Our test scores keep documenting this fact and we are nearly a decade into the Common Core experiment.

The magic professional development that will produce a Better Teacher able to motivate a student to successfully condense multiple missing years of knowledge into around 160 days, all the while simultaneously mastering a curriculum that requires understanding those thousands of bits of missing knowledge from past years? The politicians who believe in a professional development of that awesome power might as well believe in basilisks, boggarts and mountain trolls from Harry Potter. Yes, an infinitesimal percentage of children make the leap I describe when given intensive tutoring. But a student testing at a third-grade level in mathematics can usually be expected to fold when confronting an eighth-grade curriculum.

The Myth of the Magic Teacher helps no one. Especially with the many days districts are losing now to testing and data-production, I ask readers to please, please believe me: The magic teacher training formula does not exist. No magic “quality time” can compensate for the missing “quantity time” required to fill in large gaps from the past. No quick fix for the achievement gap is going to be found. Yes, we can make better teachers and administrators. We can help teachers to create safer, more productive classrooms. We can help administrators to make the best use of available staff and materials.

In the meantime, though, we will continue to get what we get. I remember this phrase from a long-ago, powerful professional development, “You get what you get.” The woman continued by explaining that we could not teach what we wanted to teach – we had to focus on what our students were ready to learn. That PD took place at the beginning of my teaching career and it made all the sense in the world.

But the testing and standards movements have been ignoring individual students. Schools try to compensate by grouping children and adapting instruction for different groups. However, when every group is expected to be learning how to manage polynomial equations such as x² – 2x +3 = 0 because these equations will be on the spring test, our differentiation tends to become more lip service than real. Standards can and do hobble reasonable attempts to individualize instruction. Curricula designed to cover all or the most important topics on the state test do the same.

If we insist on continuing to push preset standards and tests as the be-all-end-all in educational strategies – I wish we’d go back a few decades and just STOP – then I think we are past due at facing facts. Kids are being left behind all the time. No Child Left Behind shifted our focus to tests but did not dramatically change the picture being shown by those tests. The subtitle of a U.S. News and World Report article lays it out succinctly: “Only 37 percent of students are prepared for college level math and reading, according to newly released data.” The related NAEP data shows declines from 2013 to 2015, too.*

What can we do to help America’s underachieving young adults? And the children following them? I can think of one and only one fix that I believe has the potential to work: we could extend the time underachieving students spend in school. I’d start with a robust preschool education aimed at teaching vocabulary as part of a mostly play experience. Then I would create programs that attack growing gaps in student knowledge, stepping in immediately to fill the gaps instead of passing kids along – before students end up utterly lost as they log into their Google classroom to find assignments they do not even know how to start — and long before those students are forced to pay for college math and English remediation courses that don’t count toward their possible graduation.

* Camera, Laura. “High School Seniors Aren’t College-Ready. U.S. News and World Report, 27 Apr 2016

Time, time, time – see what’s become of us. What I have always needed, what my students have needed, and what I never, ever have had enough of was time. Every child who has fallen behind requires remediation – in other words, time to catch up. But lower-scoring districts often can’t add enough remediation on top of already rigorous curricular demands; and making those demands more rigorous works directly against closing the achievement gap without extra time.

The Standards Movement is killing U.S. education, at least in those districts that are not hitting targets. If we commit to using every hour of every day and then a month or so of hours that do not exist, not including those hours commandeered by testing, where will time for remediation come from? A few extra hours of tutoring after school each week may allow kids who are close to grade level to catch up before they plummet into nonperformance and hopelessness, but this country is filled with students for whom those extra hours might as well be Band-aids on third degree burns.

Who will help the lost kids who have years of content to make up before they can even begin to start their year’s Common Core or similar standards? School districts are holding endless data meetings, adding teacher coaches, talking about reducing tests, and reintroducing those career and technical classes that were once called vocational education. Myriad consultants are cranking out professional developments for principals and teachers. Education has become a stew of buzzwords today. But, in the meantime, who will help the lost kids?

Eduhonesty:  I cannot help but cynically wonder if our conversations about rigorous standards, benchmark testing, student progress monitoring, differentiated and data-driven instruction, instructional scaffolding, peer assessment, student-centered learning, cooperative learning, social-emotional learning, project-based learning, mindset training, attendance certificates, higher-order thinking skills, collaborative lesson planning, integration of technology, daily standards projected onto white boards, professional development for STEAM, digital literacy, college-and-career readiness, resilience assemblies, and bug-in-ear coaching are at least sometimes attempts to work around, or even entirely evade, an uncomfortable truth: If we want to close the achievement gap, we will have to offer students who are behind extra days and even months for learning the vocabulary and math facts they have missed — substantially more time than patchwork afternoon tutoring or mere morning summer school for the failed can offer.

Accessible, quality preschool for all U.S. students would be an obvious place to start.