If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, implementing the Common Core and associated PARCC and SBAC tests in response to NCLB’s failure to close the achievement gap easily qualifies as insane. The Common Core was established to do exactly what NCLB set out to do, if indirectly – use high-pressure testing to drive education.

Before pursuing the Core, though, a few questions should have been answered. Why did NCLB fail? Why did state test scores across the United States often refuse to rise? Why did high-stakes tests have so little impact on the achievement gap and educational results in general?

NCLB aggressively “raised the bar.” That bar went up alright, but it left a deluge of lost students behind. State test scores amply document this fact. Given that NCLB did not hit targets – not a single state came anywhere close to meeting targets — how and why should we expect that raising that proverbial bar once again will somehow produce more successful results?

Did NCLB’s lack of success result from a breakdown in interpreting the true causes of low achievement? I believe so. I would go so far as to say that I do not believe our nation’s leaders even tried to determine the causes of low achievement that plagued some areas much more than others. I believe they thought they could do an end run around those causes, solving the problem by establishing targets and threatening educators who did not meet those targets. Management by fear did not work, but that does not seem to have stopped or slowed the standards movement.

The standards movement is doing exactly the same thing as NCLB by implementing more punitive testing to force educational changes. I don’t expect the Common Core or any set of inflexible national standards to work better than NCLB — and NCLB put the EPIC in epic fail.

Eduhonesty: I view the Core and the standards movement as the latest in a long set of desperate maneuvers designed to shift the national focus away from funding reform, since any reform will affect the “haves” adversely — and the people making these educational policy decisions tend to be “haves” in the purest sense of the word.

Newbie tip: Call from school. Or block your number. Or get a google number. But don’t leave a personal number on caller ID.

Looking at my phone log, I was struck by my many fails, expressed in short phrases. Full mailbox. No answer. Phone does not work. Wrong number. Left unanswered message. Think I reached Javier, but he hung up on me.

One of my favorites, a fail I had never encountered before: “This phone does not accept incoming calls.” That phone belonged to a parent who took his two boys out of school for six weeks to go visit relatives in Puerto Rico. A few times, I managed to reach mom. Dad remained a man of mystery. Dad’s boys and I were mostly on our own.

Why am I calling? The following are common reasons why I might call home. At this point in time, no one except myself and a parent or guardian are usually involved. This is everyday teaching stuff, and the reason why 28 kids in one room does not resemble home teaching.

Frequent calls: Student needs to talk less to friends (and anyone with a mouth sometimes) in class. Too social!

Student is not doing homework and/or classwork.

Student needs to focus.

Student may require new paper, pencils and other materials. These items are not being brought to class.

Student has low or slipping grades. Possible failure warnings are essential and the sooner the better!

Student should have his or her phone in a locker. If not, that phone should never pop out in class.

Less common but not infrequent:

Student is doing great!

Student struggles to arrive to class on time. Tardiness is thumping student up the side of the head. (I don’t exactly phrase it like that, but a few minutes here, a few minutes there, and sometimes “Axel” slides bit by bit into a worsening state of confusion, especially when these minutes are spread across classrooms. “Axel” may try to take a bathroom break during each class throughout the day too.)

Student has challenges focusing on material in class. While these communications are often versions of “needs to apply” himself or herself in class, repeated calls on the same student should trigger questions. Lack of focus may imply larger issues, requiring tracking, documentation and eventual interventions.

Student showed deliberate disrespect, such as cursing at the teacher or other students. Subtle forms of this problem may include humming, whistling, tapping, water bottle tossing, or overt phone usage.

Detention alerts.

A few rarities that warrant an occasional call:

Student would benefit from tutoring, either with me after school or with an outside tutor. (I truly hate it when the parent or guardian says something like, “She does not feel like it.” I am sure she would rather play or go to the mall after school. I would too. But I am worried about this kid and I probably have good reason to be.)

Student needs to get the XYZ form signed and turned in.

Rudeness to the substitute.

Rudeness to school staff such as cafeteria workers.

Skipping. One student spent a whole day in the boy’s bathroom. I can’t imagine the stink, but no doubt it’s otherwise a great place to socialize.

Clowning in class. (Although if I make one call on “Markie” early in the year, I may be making regular calls on Markie. That boy who likes to stick pencils in his nose to get a laugh will keep finding novel things to do with pencils. I may have years with no clowning calls at all, but that one kid can make his way regularly onto every page of my phone log.)

Misbehavior with persons who are objects of attraction involving inappropriate words. Inappropriate touching will usually be passed along to administrators and social workers immediately and even words may be passed straight up the ladder. But kids are clumsy at expressing themselves and not always be alert enough to realize their attentions are unwanted. I may try to manage this problem before it escalates into sexual harassment.

Eduhonesty: When Ray’s mom hung up on me because I called to say he deliberately skipped detention, I was sympathetic. One striking feature of call logs has to be the number of parents who receive call after call after call. My colleagues are phoning the same kids that I am with a few exceptions. I understand why parents or guardians stop answering when they see the school ID on their phone. Especially in middle school, behaviors can skew quickly sideways.*

Phone logs tend to look alike across the years. Those talkers without pencils are as ubiquitous as the weeds in my lawn. I do battle with the weeds, the talking, the lack of supplies, and the aggravation of proliferating cell phones. That’s part of the social/emotional aspect of teaching. To properly explain the day’s mathematics, I must command my group’s attention. Calling home helps me to get that attention.

Unfortunately, my most problematic kids tend to have those full message, wrong number, disconnected, and otherwise unavailable phones. My school’s office will try to track down numbers for me, but sometimes I am stuck. Then I start writing letters. Teacher-readers, sometimes letters work. Sometimes Mara’s mom simply forgot to contact the school when her number changed. A letter or two are worth the time to post.

Hugs to all of you in these homebound times!

*I believe test pressure and the standards movement often contribute to these sudden behavioral changes, as students react to the anxious feeling that they are unable to meet demands. But that’s another post, one I have written before.

1. Poverty is not just a lack of money.
2. All cultures are not equally friendly toward formal education.
3. The internet is trouble, especially for kids with phones and little adult guidance.
4. “I don’t like to read!” is a phrase teachers hear often.
5. Gangs are not going away.
6. “Just say no!” frequently fails, although we have to try red ribbon weeks designed to discourage drugs.
7. Because drugs are not going away.

The standards movement and other brainstorms by leaders in education, business and government tend to treat all students as factory inputs with equal potential and essentially similar characteristics. Accordingly, and increasingly over time, almost all students are kept in the mainstream, including those who struggle academically or emotionally. Environment is the invisible elephant in America’s room. While no one can solve the many kinks in learning introduced by environment — we can’t erase the bullet holes in Daisy’s garage and do much about the fact she got no sleep — we do no one any favors by refusing to allow that environment to influence our teaching and actions. Maybe Daisy frankly should be allowed to sleep for a period or two without her teacher worrying about admin entering and writing the teacher up for not forcing Daisy to stare blankly at the whiteboard.

This post was inspired by a number of teachers who are currently trying to make online learning work against the odds. Educators know that luck of the district and demographic matter enormously in making remote learning work. I admire the many fierce attempts out there to keep learning on track.

The current crisis favors districts with access to electronics and practice with electronics. It favors districts that have been passing out those iPads freely for years, sending the iPads home rather than corralling them at the end of the day. It favors kids who live with parents who have been videoconferencing and using group connection apps for years.

Poverty is not just a lack of money. Sometimes it’s the absence of wi-fi. Sometimes it’s a lack of experience with expensive tools. Or poverty may be a single parent who can’t answer questions because her position as a pharmacy tech depends on her driving into work.

Eduhonesty: Teachers are trying heroically to make learning work as classroom doors lock behind them. These home-bound people could be making banana bread instead of scouring the internet for student-friendly lessons. But many of them will do better than others for reasons having nothing to do with their motivation or effort. You can’t teach the kid who does not use the Google classroom.

In hopes that this post will help prevent more teachers from being blamed for events and forces beyond their control…

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Educational funding reform could help equalize the technology gap, but that’s another post for another time.

I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.

~ From “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” screenwriters Jeffrey Price, Pete S. Seaman, and Gary K. Wolf. The pic is from dreamstime.com , bunny-cartoon-vector-hand-drawing-funny-painted-rabbit-carrot-paws-isolated-white-background-96733733.

Not all schools are closed. Not all students have gone out on the staycation that is causing consternation across the United States. Some kids are in school. But they are not immune to the barrage of apocalyptic news traversing cables and airwaves. Those kids with anxiety disorders? I guarantee many are spending hours on the precipice of a full-blown panic attack.

Those kids may escalate misbehaviors. Acting out is a distraction. Acting out can help you escape that fearful place inside your own head, leading you into more familiar territory — yet another talk with the teacher, dean or principal. For some kids right now, talking to the dean may seem infinitely preferable to thinking about scared parents or guardians trying to manage the toilet paper crisis.

Eduhonesty: Teachers are scared, students are scared, and scared has a way of sending some students off the rails. I suggest a mantra for teachers who are encountering unusual management challenges: At https://anxiety-gone.com/52-mantras-natural-anxiety-relief, you can find a favorite of your own. My mantra of choice has long been “just keep swimming.” I also like, “this is only temporary” — it’s good for these times and also for the moment when “George” decides to knock over his desk or toss his water bottle across the room. I’d share these mantras with students who are struggling.

I’ll add one more mantra of my own for the Georges and their classmates: “He’s not a bad rabbit. He’s just trying to draw himself that way.”

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This post is for all the worried teachers who are posting in various groups, talking about the lack of learning that will be part of the landscape of 2020. Yes, it’s a mess. Some schools had time to prepare packets and work for home. Some did not. Some schools have functional one-to-one device set-ups that have enabled them to shift easily to working remotely with Google classroom. Others simply never had the money to hand out all those Chromebooks to go home. Many students in those financially-challenged districts may live without wi-fi or easy internet access. The old option of sitting in a coffee shop no longer works within Illinois and other states. Those shops are closed.

(Cheat: Although odds are you can park near that coffee shop and use their wi-fi. Having taught in a poor district, I know that some kids across America have been finishing their homework by parking near their school or a handy wi-fi site, and working in the car.)

So what to do? Obviously teachers must follow administrative directives. If you have to keep posting to Google Classroom or whatever alternative you are using, post away. If you must call homes, then make the calls. If admin has stated that school is effectively closed due to the requirement to meet IEPs that cannot be met because the students in question cannot manage remote learning — well, then. You are closed. Accept this fact. The plan where no student is educated because a small group of students cannot be educated off campus has many teachers emoting on social media right now. Like the testing penalties from No Child Behind, this strategy makes little sense and is obviously producing less learning than alternatives. But the legal rationale behind that decision is understandable. Could the district be sued for not meeting its obligations? Probably. This is America. Anybody can sue anybody. A man on “The People’s Court” yesterday was suing the guy his dog had bitten, I think for defaming the dog or something. The district is probably safe from legal “remedies” if it shuts the virtual doors, however.

A tsunami has swept across U.S. education in the last few weeks. Congratulations to all the teachers and parents who are making this stunning shift in routine work somehow. But if it’s not working well, if strange edicts from admin or lack of connectivity are confounding your best efforts, I suggest making a chocolate cake or pulling out the Monopoly game in the closet. Let it go.

I am so sympathetic. When a man or woman has spent years getting kids ready for their next learning adventure, not being able to fulfill that mission can be heartrending. You want all your kids to walk into fifth grade or trigonometry with confidence. But these are wild times and we will have to trust next year’s teachers to patch the holes left in 2020’s knowledge. I have faith that our kids will navigate next year’s challenges.

Eduhonesty: I had mono and relapsed when I was in my first year of high school. That exhaustion and low-grade fever ate up the first half of my freshman experience, but eluded diagnosis until mid-December. The gym teacher glared at me as I sat out swimming, and other teachers seemed absolutely unsympathetic. The only expression of concern I ever got came from a geometry teacher who overheard me telling a friend when they were testing me for rheumatic fever. I was ninety-nine point eight degrees tired enough to walk into a wall, and pale as my notebook paper, but those teachers had never seen me before. The point of this story is I effectively lost the first half of that year. I went home and went straight to sleep. I could not concentrate in class. But I came back. I graduated high in my class and went on to get an M.A. in Secondary Education and a Masters in Business and Public Management.

Our kids will come back from this fractured year. I hope not too many educational leaders will prove stupid enough to worry about the year’s decline in test scores — they’d better decline this year. If they don’t decline, U.S. educational leaders should return control of the classroom to teachers immediately, since the Common Core or latest set of standards and those scripted lesson plans would be shown to be an abysmal failure in light of that result. I hope all those tests will be cancelled.

But our kids will come back. They will fill in the holes they missed, at least the ones they require to move on with their educations. And if they are hazy about the Battle of Shiloh, Siri or Google can fill in the gaps.

It’s going to be awful, but it’s going to be O.K.

Kudos to the districts that are finding ways to keep feeding their students after being told they must close schools. Kudos to the districts that are NOT requiring teachers to go in anyway when the students are gone. Kudos to the districts that are letting teachers bring their children to school when the kids’ district closed but mom or dad’s did not. Kudos to the many teachers trying desperately to make online learning work despite a frequent lack of resources, especially those with children at home. Kudos to all the teachers online who are sharing the strategies they have found that seem to be working.

And shame on America’s leaders for letting us get into such a mess. New York has counted over 729 confirmed COVID-19 cases as of today but believes thousands are out there. Still, officials have not closed schools. Evidence suggests those schools have about 114,000 homeless students — an entirely credible number — who can’t do without the hot meals, medical care and even laundry facilities those schools provide. I understand the rationale for not shutting the school doors, but I look at the facts and see those schools becoming sites of disease transmission — sites that will be sending the new coronavirus back into the impoverished, mostly minority areas that “support” those large homeless populations. According to www.advocatesforchildren.org/node/1403, one in ten students in the New York City district and charter schools are homeless, and 85% of these homeless students are black or Hispanic.

Eduhonesty: All those endless, ongoing debates about providing health insurance to all Americans? The lack of sick leave for U.S. workers? Those homeless populations left to manage on their own? Neglect by government leaders at the highest levels appears to have set up a perfect storm in New York, as well as other places where the poor and the sick will go to work, and their children will go to school.

Because we have left them with no other, better options.

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Update: Within a few hours of publishing this, in response to growing pressure, Mayor de Blasio announced New York schools will be closing for at least a month starting Monday. For at least a week, schools will be open to provide take-out breakfast and lunch. Some schools will be kept open as “learning centers” for the children of essential workers — health care workers and others who are essential to basic functioning of the area. They will also be open to homeless children. The city is gearing up to roll out online learning.

We are all in uncharted territory. I appreciate the immensity of the effort underway. To those people who are becoming concerned about the loss of learning that will occur this year, I’d like to say, let it go. It’s time to cancel the spring tests and let it go.

Just as it’s time for universal healthcare, guaranteed sick leave so people don’t have to drag their feverish bodies into school or work, and a concerted attack on homelessness.

The list of open positions for this week is the longest I have ever seen. I am guessing Corona Virus fears have begun to siphon away the local sub pool. In my last post I counted openings. As of tonight, I find 87 (!) possibilities listed.

Eduhonesty: I am not sure I have written such a straightforward warning piece in the past. But this count is running much too high for this time of year. I don’t know if Corona is inspiring some teachers to stay home with their fevers, teachers who might have trudged through the workday in the past. I suspect that accounts for a few of the openings for substitutes.

But here is what I see coming: in “Yes, We Have No Substitutes Today,” I wrote about the general life of a sub. Subbing tends to pay poorly, but many men and women after retirement enjoy spending days in the classroom. The ability to choose when and whether to work makes subbing perfect for a retiree.

Those retirees are mostly over sixty years of age. No doubt with some hardy exceptions, they will not be getting on cruise ships. They may be avoiding airplanes and other public transit. They will be picking public events carefully. Current CDC advice tells seniors to avoid crowds.

Lunch duty, anyone? I project a rapidly increasing sub shortage in a time when existing shortages often prove problematic. That shortage appears inevitable to me. Many subs are working for love, not money. Many can afford not to work. And damn those kids can get you sick, even without COVID-19. That’s part of why I have been avoiding elementary schools in favor of middle schools lately. I was on antibiotics for almost three weeks last year from two separate febrile illnesses I caught in schools. At least, I think I caught those illnesses in schools. Kids always have runny noses. They are always coughing. Cough. Cough. One boy got up a couple of weeks ago to avoid coughing on his classmates and coughed on his hand and my coat instead.

The sub pool is already shrinking. Those 87 vacancies represent clicks that never happened. My “favorite substitute” emails magnify this impression. I receive emails from the sub site titled “Preferred Substitute Alert,” electronic missives that mostly prove useless because I don’t check my mail often. The last couple of preferred sub openings waited for me, however.

I hate to write this. But if you are a regular teacher right now, I recommend you begin thinking about how you will manage without substitute teachers. In concrete terms, the odds that your planning periods will be stolen are going up fast. Be prepared to work without those periods as you cover for missing colleagues. Be prepared for longer evenings and weekends as grading time disappears. I’d simplify grading as much as possible, skewing toward single-grade group work for example.

And that friend who subs for you? Get that subbing set up if possible. If you don’t have any subs on your preferred list, I’d suggest taking time to talk to possible subs, collaring them in the teacher’s lounge or even your book club or grocery store. Get emails or phone numbers when possible. You may wish to advocate for yourself rather than waiting for the secretaries to make their way down the call list. As I said in my last post, I like to sleep in and I don’t take those calls.

I might sweeten the pot with a little chocolate, too. Or a thank-you note. Going the extra mile to make your substitute feel appreciated could simplify life greatly when you find you must be out of the classroom. While many subs may be going on sabbatical, others will not. You want to connect to those hardy souls. Even if the retirees begin to duck, I suspect the aspiring young teachers trying to make an employment connection will not.

Advocate for your district, too. Recruit new subs if possible. A few days ago, a friend of mine told me her district had plenty of openings. They had just begun eliminating preferred subs in hopes that by posting all possible jobs, they might get more subs to make that critical click, that “yes, I’ll cover your social studies classes on Friday.”

I imagine this post remains unnecessary for many readers, especially in the heartland. A colleague was complaining yesterday about all the required new procedures in her school, given that her state still did not have single confirmed COVID-19 case. My sympathy goes out to the confused people in states with no or almost no cases who are wondering where the toilet paper, paper towels, rubbing alcohol, bottled water, hand sanitizer and masks are going. (I am truly baffled by the run on water especially.) Regardless, I looked at those 87 jobs and thought it might be time to write this post.

Forewarned is forearmed.