What has been happening in education for most of the last two decades?

Let me lay out a simplified version of the problem, a chart that shows a piece of recent history starting with No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2003:

Essentially, we threatened people from the top down. “Do it or else!” We’ve continued to threaten people since the inception of NCLB, having adopted test scores as THE measures of teacher competence. Yet improvements in test scores have generally been scant or even nonexistent. Here is just one example from https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/education/2019/10/30/naep-detroit-students-improve-in-math-michigan-improves-ranking/2491631001/: “Michigan’s student scores also slightly improved in fourth-grade math and reading as well as in eighth-grade math but not in a statistically significant way. Scores in eighth-grade math declined by more than two points compared to 2017, however.”

Maybe it’s time to stop threatening people. When test scores are considered alone — without considering language barriers, special education status, socioeconomic considerations — like all those parents who CANNOT be home this year helping their kids with online education — without considering how valid, reliable and appropriate those tests are… well, it’s no wonder many teachers feel trapped. They are trapped. English language learners who cannot read the test will not pass the test. Special education students with significant reading disabilities will not pass the test. Homeless kids who have been switching from classroom to classroom throughout their lives are unlikely to pass the test.

Yet we threaten teachers when students cannot pass inappropriate tests. We put these teachers on remediation plans when they have nothing to remediate. We deny them tenure or take away their tenure because their school is adding greater numbers of homeless students.

Testing hurts many kids, the kids gasping at the bottom of the tree. It hurts teachers who have to watch those gasping, lost kids. And it has been insidiously doing damage to education all across the United States as teachers finally decide they have had enough.

See https://www.epi.org/publication/the-teacher-shortage-is-real-large-and-growing-and-worse-than-we-thought-the-first-report-in-the-perfect-storm-in-the-teacher-labor-market-series/

“The teacher shortage is real, large and growing, and worse than we thought: The first report in ‘The Perfect Storm in the Teacher Labor Market’ series. By Emma Garcia and Elaine Weiss, March 26, 2019.

Teachers are fleeing this profession. In social media they are regularly asking for advice on how best to do so. Blame gets old. Hard-working, dedicated, college graduates who are regularly attacked for factors outside their control cannot be expected to hang in indefinitely. When I put in the search “how do i get out of teaching” I get 1,100,000,000 results from Google.

The momentum of testing has been slowed by COVID-19. This is a perfect time for parents and teachers to try to put a stop to standardized-test-driven instruction. With luck, reader, your tests are shut down this year. Parents, if the tests are still scheduled, OPT OUT. Tell school and other leaders in your state that you do not plan to subject your child to this too often ego-battering experience. Teachers, raise the issue with people around you. You may be stuck administering that test this year, but 2020 and 2021 will be perfect times to point out the absurdity and toxicity of this set-up. Push the union to carry the torch high in a fight to reclaim instructional time and flexibility.

U.S. education been pointed at that test for nearly two decades now. What do we have to show for our efforts? Test scores are stagnant. Teachers are leaving. And here’s a sobering stat: “…between 2007 and 2012, anxiety disorders in children and teens went up 20%.” from https://www.healthychildren.org/English/health-issues/conditions/emotional-problems/Pages/Anxiety-Disorders.aspx , the American Academy of Pediatrics, 2019.

We are killing these kids, at least the ones who still care. We are driving others to tune out. Why play a game you feel you can never win? Detaching from school may be the best move available to some children. We are driving once excellent teachers toward real estate licenses and early retirement. NCLB is gone, but we have institutionalized a system in which the test determines the curriculum and books and materials that students use — whether those students are ready or not. That’s a perfect set-up for the creation of anxiety disorders — in students and the adults overseeing their classrooms. (Written by a retired teacher who quit a few years earlier than she intended after she lost over 20% of her last school year to required tests her bilingual students mostly could not even read.)

It’s time to shift our focus towards learning instead of test results.

P.S. Those ADHD diagnoses? See https://www.eduhonesty.com/seeing-what-we-want-to-see/

“People get viruses. Our leaders must understand, though, that viruses don’t just go away, not always. I am getting my second shingles shot this Thursday because chicken pox never goes away – it just waits to become some peoples attack of shingles, and then some peoples permanent post-herpetic neuralgia – otherwise known as lifelong nerve pain. A previous post talked more about viral infections of the past. The current thinking supports the idea that most people will clear COVID-19 from their bodies. But nobody yet understands what is happening with the long haulers, those people who got sick early in the epidemic and who are still sick.” See: https://www.eduhonesty.com/better-to-be-too-scared-of-those-classrooms-than-not-scared-enough/, (amber)

In educational terms – half measures for safety are unacceptable. The ventilation in classrooms must reach osha standards. https://www.businessinsider.com/poor-indoor-air-quality-could-make-schools-coronavirus-hotspots-2020-9 lays out a few technical details: “…although there’s no simple, easy, or cheap way to measure coronavirus particles in the air, carbon dioxide can be a “canary in the coal mine,” according to Roger Silveira, an air-quality specialist and the facilities director at San Jose’s East Side Union High School District. Carbon-dioxide monitors sell for about $100. 

In a building with good ventilation, CO2 levels should generally stay under 1,100 parts per million, Silveira said.”

If school rooms can’t hit these air quality targets, those rooms should remain closed. The hand sanitizer, deep cleaning, temperature checks and masks must be there. Or the rooms don’t open. A school should not open for live instruction until all safety protocols are in place and operating smoothly.

Because there are pediatric long haulers. There are adult long haulers. There are deceased teachers and school staff members – and there will be more. We can’t stop this virus yet, but we must hold illness down to the lowest level possible as we open up schools.

The Federal government has led us to a place where we have 4% of the world’s population and 21% of the world’s COVID-19 cases, an inauspicious beginning for this year’s school openings. Not long ago, we had 25% of the world’s deaths so our situation is improving — or the world’s situation is deteriorating. But in a couple of days, we will pass the 200,000 dead mark.

If safety takes additional funding, government leaders need to pony up NOW. Years and years of underfunding schools while the infrastructure of some buildings slowly decayed has caught up with us. Like our old bridges, not all our old schools can carry the weight of today’s sudden increase in demands. That does not excuse government leaders from responsibility for making those schools safe. We close unsafe bridges — most of the time — and unsafe schools must be closed as well. If the air doesn’t circulate, and the windows don’t open, that should end all discussion until repairs are completed.

A note for parents: And recent reports in the New York Post and other sources saying 86% of teachers bought their own PPE for in-person classes — reader, read between those lines. That’s how much faith the people on the front lines have in their leaders’ concern for their well-being. I’d think about that carefully before I volunteered to send my child for in-person classes. I’d visit any school before I started regularly sending my child through those big, wide front doors.

Me being me, I might take a carbon dioxide monitor with me. Ideally, I’d want to go in when students were present. If I were a teacher, I’d definitely check room gasses.

P.S. I might go on my neighborhood app to see if I could borrow the monitor. Note that this monitor is not a carbon monoxide detector. You are looking for carbon dioxide instead.

P.S.S. Want a technical read? Here’s an article from the Journal of Pediatrics: https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(20)31023-4/fulltext

It’s conclusion? “This study reveals that children may be a potential source of contagion in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in spite of milder disease or lack of symptoms, and immune dysregulation is implicated in severe post-infectious MIS-C.” The first part of that conclusion is crystal clear — kids, even kids who don’t seem sick, appear able to spread the infection. The second part says that a severe disease process that affects some children after they get the coronavirus is believed to result from a misguided immune response that causes the children’s immune systems to attack their own tissues.

Here’s a quick read at least partly taken from the above source: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kids-bigger-silent-spreaders-covid-19_l_5f3eb8e4c5b6305f3254cb1e

I subbed today in a school where 83% of students passed the state’s new annual test, the PARCC test, compared to 33% of students in the state of Illinois overall. Only 2% of the students in this school fall into the low-income category. The rooms are large, walls covered with student work and cheery, inspirational posters. Happy, helpful teachers guided me through hallways. I passed out videotaping permission slips for a teacher trying for her national certification. To those who keep reading about America’s educational meltdown, I assure you nothing even glowed hot in the district where I helped out today.

We don’t read about these districts in the news. The fact that a librarian searching for the answer “Aesop” as an ancient Greek storyteller was given the wrong answer “Homer” by a third- or fourth-grade student goes unnoticed by the outside world. I noticed, though. Who taught that kid about Homer? I spent a day surrounded by impressive little eight- and nine-year-olds who knew more — sometimes much more — than seventh graders who had been passed on to me in another district about 13 miles away.

So many factors affect educational results that I tend to duck topics related to discrepancies in scores between districts. But that district where 83% passed the new state test compared to 33% overall — a 50% difference — has an extraordinarily low poverty rate. In that district 13 miles away where I once taught seventh grade, the poverty rate in the elementary school runs 90% — and only 12% of that school passed the PARCC test.

Still, I’m going to duck the issue of poverty and test results for the moment. I will simply observe that students in American schools continue to compete and beat other students from the best schools around the world — those American students lucky enough to live in the right zip codes, anyway.

(I wrote this post last year, but I lost track of it in my drafts file. Please share this post with new teachers especially.)

He’s thin to the point of scrawniness, a smiling kid with many friends. He’s not afraid to speak up in class and he likes to be silly. He seems young for his age, but he’s popular. The girls definitely like him. He’s behind in class and falling farther behind, and I don’t know how to solve the problem that’s been unfolding. He keeps coming up with the oddest physical symptoms to explain absences or trips to the nurse. The kids all tell me he’s skipping. I checked with the nurse recently and she did not know anything about the “notes he had to bring to the nurse” and other excuses.

I need to send Davey to the nurse shortly. His last bloodwork showed sugar problems, he said. His mom does not seem to know what is happening. He has doctors but she cannot tell me what — if anything — is wrong with him. I believe Davey tells her that he feels bad and she lets him stay home. He suffered a genuine illness around Christmas, and mom was naturally spooked by his brief hospital stay.

Eduhonesty: Every year, my school has a few of these kids. They miss day after day of school, suffering from amorphous complaints that parents indulge. Frequently, a real event kicked off the absences, often a scary illness or injury. As part of that event, our Daveys discover they like staying home. They like mom fussing over them and fixing them special food while they watch TV all day.

“She has always been sickly,” dad or mom will say to me. These parents don’t understand the academic cost of all those many sick days.

Many of my strongest students have been sick this year. I had a mild case of the flu and a long, aggravating head cold. Almost all my students have come into class hacking and sneezing. Sometimes I send students to the nurse when I suspect fevers. Sometimes she sends feverish kids home, at least when she can find a parent or guardian to take care of them. Mostly, I cringe a little and then place the hand cleaner in a prominent position. Conditions permitting, I open windows.

I support keeping feverish kids home. I encourage parents to let kids spend the first day or two of a cold at home. But Davey is going to crash and burn academically if mom does not stop him from opting out of school. To my teacher-readers: Do you have a Davey or two? I have not found a solution, but I can offer a few suggestions:

♦ If you have a nurse on the premises, talk to the nurse. Let the nurse know your concerns. If Davey is truly sick, the school needs to know what is happening. Schools are monster petri dishes in the best of times. On the other hand, if Davey does not seem to have a diagnosable illness, the nurse can then push him back into class as quickly as possible.

♦ Talk to mom and dad. Show them the effect of missed classes and tests in some concrete form. You might show them the material your Davey missed during his last absence and his subsequent failed quiz. Looking at textbook pages, activity sheets and failed quizzes can make lost schooling real for parents.

♦ Don’t be too sympathetic. I am usually among the first to express sympathy for my sick kids, but sympathy absolutely will not help Davey. Sympathy becomes another perk of being sick, like those pajama days of watching TV while eating Takis.

♦ Talk to Davey’s other teachers. A united front by the adults can help keep Davey on track. Praise Davey for being in class.

♦ Be proactive. You may have to kick the truancy machinery into motion at some point. Especially in academically-disadvantaged and urban schools, your classes may suffer from many absences, but repeated absences quickly become toxic to learning. Unless your school has received proof of a physical problem, when a student misses too many days of classes, sending the local truancy officer out may help. It can’t hurt.

♦ You might try a behavior contract in which the student promises to attend and you offer rewards for meeting attendance goals.

♦ CONSIDER BULLYING as a possible issue. Is Nadia feigning illness so she can get a day off to relax? Or is Nadia afraid to come to school? I can see the faces of two girls in particular as I write this last bullet point — both of whom were staying home out of fear. One suddenly started attending school regularly when a mean girl moved. Bullying can be especially tough to manage — but students must get the help they need. Your classroom and school should always be safe for students.

Eduhonesty: Teacher-readers might want to show this post to friends who wonder where all your time goes. I can’t imagine how many hours of my life I have spent on this one issue. Every year, I have had a few of these students. I did not always solve the problem, but I made phone calls and held parent/guardian conferences. I talked with the nurse. I talked with my students. I talked with administration. I talked with truancy specialists. I created behavior contracts and incentive systems for attendance. Hour by hour by hour…

P.S. When I express concern about planning time loss from meetings and data-gathering requirements, issues such as Davey’s attendance are part of the reason. Managing absenteeism is a necessary duty for teachers, but also an easy duty to push off for another day. When bureaucratic and data requirements suck up too much teacher planning time, our Daveys may end up on the back-burner until their absences become a chronic and intractable problem. Absenteeism can quickly become a habit. That’s why I would like to encourage new teachers to start managing their chronically absent students now. If you have not already waded into this morass, you might take a few minutes today to strategize how you will tackle absenteeism when you return to class. You can win this one. That win may get a kid through high school and beyond. I will always remember that crying mom in her lace dress with her fistful of Mylar balloons and flowers, sobbing as she thanked me for helping her once chronically-absent daughter to cross the stage and pick up her diploma.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Sometimes I write a post that I think matters more than most. I would like to ask readers to pass this post on to parents of adolescent children. By the end of the post, you will understand why.

Taken from https://www.yahoo.com/politics/feds-offer-little-guidance-to-islamic-state-090043284.html at Yahoo, I offer the opening of that article for thought:

Aasha, 17, looked up from her hands and saw the faces of six of her closest friends staring back at her. They awkwardly sat in a circle in a small counselor’s office in their high school.

“Why would you do something so stupid?” one of Aasha’s friends, Badra, finally asked.

“We just wanted to go over there to study,” Aasha replied.

“There’s a library right here,” Badra said. “You can study all you want.”

The girls grew up together in a dusty suburb of Denver called Aurora, attending the same mosque with their families on Parker Road. They were like sisters, sharing secrets, complaining about their strict immigrant parents and talking about boys since they were in elementary school.

Intense high school friendships end for all kinds of reasons — boys, social ambition, different schedules. But what this circle faced was far more dramatic — and more hurtful. They were torn apart by the Islamic State, whose recruiters quietly seduced three girls in their group online without any of the others even noticing. Now, the six girls faced down their former friend and weren’t sure they had ever really known her.

Just a week before this conclave at the counselor’s office, Aasha, her 15-year-old sister, Mariam, and her 16-year-old friend Leyla vanished without so much as a goodbye to their family or friends. (Yahoo News has changed the girls’ names to protect their identities because they were minors when they attempted to travel to Syria. Badra’s name has also been changed to protect her identity.) They skipped school one Friday, took a cab to the airport and boarded the first flight on their lengthy itinerary to the Middle East.

The girls were on their way to Syria to join the most feared terrorist organization in the world. They had been communicating with IS recruiters and sympathizers for months using secret online identities, and their views became more radical by the day.

Eduhonesty: I can see these girls all sitting together in the counselor’s office, young and earnest. In the end, the girls went home and the FBI told parents to monitor their internet use. They have not been charged with a crime. They will continue walking around the halls of their high school.

I recently posted about Snapchat as part of the problems created by the technology of our time. Teachers today constantly battle cellphone use, texting or gaming in class or in the bathroom. In the 91% low-income middle school where I taught last year, a number of students had newer or better phones than my iPhone 5.

How do we manage this problem? I honestly don’t see a fix here. Blocking cell calls at school helps, but what happens after school? I’d like to recommend that teachers specifically talk to parents about the hazards of phone use, especially if a student has racked up phone violations. Please suggest parents look at these phones.

Parents can be too respectful of adolescent privacy. Snapchats may disappear, but a great many details remain on a phone. If Rachelle has called her would-be boyfriend 3 times between midnight and morning, parents need to know. If Rachelle is sexting that same boy, parents desperately need to know. What phone numbers are in that phone? What contacts? What websites has Rachelle visited recently? If Rachelle’s phone history has been erased, parents should consider that erasure a huge red flag. Most students normally erase histories about as often as they clean lockers.

Parents should insist on knowing their children’s passwords and they should look at phones regularly. At some point, these children will be adults and entitled to phone privacy, but a sixteen-year-old boy or girl is too young to manage life without adult supervision. One expectation upon being given that expensive phone ought to be the understanding that mom or dad has the right to check that phone.

Before we all had phones, most parents insisted on knowing many details of their children’s daily activities. Who were you with? Where did you go? Were his parents home? Why are you late? When does play practice end? What movie are you going to see? Etc. Life was mostly transparent and the questions were simple. No one would have thought to say, “Did you contact IS? Who is your contact in Syria? How often do you talk? Why would you want to go to Frankfurt?”

These are scarier times. We can’t put our heads in that proverbial desert sand. Adolescents should not be able to regard their phones as parent and teacher-free zones. Those girls who were lucky enough to be retrieved and sent home from Frankfurt provide a perfect example.

From Business Insider, “Science says that parents of successful kids have these 7 things in common” by Drake Baer, Mar. 30, 2015, 2:57 PM: Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/parenting-successful-kids-2015-3#ixzz3XcCjKIv6

I pulled the following text from the article’s end, a section on the benefits of teaching a growth mindset.

Where kids think success comes from also predicts their attainment.

Over decades, Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck has discovered that children (and adults) think about success in one of two ways. Over at the always-fantastic Brain Pickings, Maria Popova says they go a little something like this:

A “fixed mindset” assumes that our character, intelligence, and creative ability are static givens which we can’t change in any meaningful way, and success is the affirmation of that inherent intelligence, an assessment of how those givens measure up against an equally fixed standard; striving for success and avoiding failure at all costs become a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled.

A “growth mindset,” on the other hand, thrives on challenge and sees failure not as evidence of un-intelligence but as a heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities.

At the core is a distinction in the way you assume your will affects your ability, and it has a powerful effect on kids. If kids are told that they aced a test because of their innate intelligence, that creates a “fixed” mindset. If they succeeded because of effort, that teaches a “growth” mindset.

In one study of 4-year-olds, Dweck let kids choose between solving easy or difficult jigsaw puzzles. The kids with a fixed mindset chose the easier one, since it would validate their god-given abilities. The growth-oriented kids opted for the harder puzzle, since they saw it as an opportunity to learn.

Like Popova notes, the “fixed” kids wanted to do the easy puzzle since it would help them look smart and thus successful; the “growth” kids wanted the hard puzzles since their sense of success was tied up in becoming smarter.

So when you praise your kids, don’t congratulate them for being so smart, commend them for working so hard.

Eduhonesty: Being pretty sick of testing, I thought I might (gasp!) write about another topic. I failed, but here’s my latest fail, complete with a picture of the family piano. The young man on the piano has children older than he was in that photo now, children whose feet once dangled down from the piano bench until we had a special, matching, oak footrest made.

How do we convince kids to view their intelligence as malleable and expandable? For my own kids, the piano offered at least one direct connection to a growth mindset. Intelligence and intellectual progress are tricky to measure, while the tinkling of piano keys reflects learning in a straightforward, easily-seen dynamic. In our house’s music room, years of piano lessons unfolded; simple songs became complex sonatas, and end-of-practice chocolates became gold medals and trophies.

As we layer test upon test, packing our classrooms with strategies for score-improvement, music programs are being sacrificed in many districts because their content cannot teach to the tests. Of the three music teachers in my school, only one kept her position for next year. Music’s connection to higher math and English scores lacks immediacy in these frantic times, so administrators trade in music programs for alternative electives more likely to boost scores.

For America’s kids, these lost music programs carry costs that may not be obvious on the surface. What is the cost of not finding out that hard work and practice can result in the ability to play the string bass? The cost of never getting the opportunity to discover that persistence can make a good drummer out of somebody who fumbled those drumsticks for months? We are taking successes away from a group of kids who need successes, kids who don’t believe in themselves anymore, not after years of dodging through the data-strewn minefield that the average school represents. Those music classes might restore some cracked and battered self-esteem or, if not, at least provide students with a few hours of solace as they crash through the educational underbrush, stumbling toward their next test.

The above article discusses a critical point. Intelligence doesn’t amount to much without effort. Any teacher knows that. America’s children require palpable opportunities to create efforts that yield results. Four years in band can rescue a boy who might otherwise have dropped out of school. Choir class can be the one, bright light in a girl’s school day. Why do we need to keep our music classes? Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart once said, “The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.”

In the silence between, we can pause to hear the music that has been sculpted by hours of practice and hard work. In the silence between, we can make out the clear connection between effort and creation. Tests are measurements, not creations. If we want to teach effort, we have to provide opportunities for creation, and a chance to learn the connection between work and the stretching of our abilities. Some students may make that connection in mathematics, some in music, and some in track and field. Our students have innumerable talents and interests.

We talk a lot about diversity nowadays. I’ll submit one last thought: As we hone in on mathematics and English to the exclusion of all other subjects, we are damaging and even destroying much of the diversity that once made America’s schools great.