Here are the numbers from a previous post that made me silently curse as I pasted them into what I had written:
Percent of workers with the ability to work from home by income percentile
| Income percentile | Percent |
|---|---|
| Bottom 25 | 6.6% |
| 25-50 | 15.5% |
| 50-75 | 31.7% |
| Top 25 | 55.5% |
Repeat: Only about 1 in 5 workers in the bottom half of U.S. wage earners can be expected to be able to work at home.
What does that mean if you are a teacher? It means the mom or dad who could sit your 4th grade student down at the computer, help that kid get started and provide support throughout the day — that mom or dad is most likely to be lumped into the top quarter of income earners in the U.S. Those lower wage earners can’t sit home all day helping their kids. They can’t afford expensive sitters either.
This is one MAJOR REASON why sustained online and hybrid learning can be expected to widen the achievement gap.
Yet in many places, teachers are still being evaluated on student performance. If the Biden Administration continues on its current course, standardized test performance will be part of some evaluation packages. Is that fair? Does that even make sense?
Eduhonesty: These standardized tests are hammering kids’ psyches hard. I’ll write more about that in the near future. For now, let’s look at the tests’ impact on teachers.
Are you a teacher, reader? If so, far and away your best strategic move employment-wise may be to take a position in a district where parents are positioned at the top of the income distribution — because poverty has the potential to be a tremendous loser for you come evaluation time. Wealthy districts overall post higher — often much higher — test scores. In 2020 and 2021, the ability to hire the right sitter or work at home has often been crucial to learning. Parental support always mattered, but never as much as now. If kids are not logging on or staying at the computer, they are not learning.
I absolutely don’t want to imply that parents at the bottom of the income charts are not supportive. But parents who must be at work to pay the rent cannot also be sitting beside their children during online math. Clones and robots who could fill in for parents are still a few decades away, and the wealthy will own them first regardless. I know heroic sacrifices are being made right now, too, by families who are managing to have that one parent at home while cancelling services and cutting back or eliminating every discretionary purchase possible. Women especially are torpedoing their careers to be at home.
But evaluation systems now often effectively hold teachers responsible for the resources and socioeconomic conditions of their students. Why do so many teachers dread those upcoming state standardized tests? Those tests have been used as weapons against teachers for years. Low test scores can and have resulted in lower evaluations and even loss of merit pay. In some cases, teachers have been terminated for those scores. In Rhode Island, a whole district was terminated for those scores.
In February of 2010, School Superintendent Frances Gallo and the school committee in Central Falls, Rhode Island’s smallest and poorest city, voted to fire every educator at Central Falls High School at the end of the school year. The committee did this because they were failing under NCLB, with only around half of the school’s students graduating, and only 7 percent of 11th-graders proficient in math in 2009. At a committee meeting, 93 names were called out aloud for firing — 74 classroom teachers and reading specialists, guidance counselors, physical education teachers, the school psychologist, as well as the principal and all three assistant principals, according to the Providence Journal.
I understand some of the teachers at the city’s only high school cried, but the Superintendent and committee held their ground. Then-President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan applauded the move. Arne Duncan said that this move was an example of “doing the right thing for kids.”
The word “scapegoating” comes to mind and I remain aghast at this piece of ugly politicking. I remember thinking; if we are going to sacrifice teachers en masse, without regard for their actual job performance, why fire only the high school? These students undoubtedly entered high school years behind targets. Their high school math scores make that clear. Why not fire the whole damn elementary and middle school staff? Why not fire them all?
This grand gesture sickened me. I am sure Central Falls had some substandard teachers. There’s no district of any size that doesn’t have a few turkeys. But I am also sure there were some stellar teachers in that group, teachers who regularly worked 70 plus hours a week as many of our best teachers do regularly. Especially in our most challenged school districts, hopelessly optimistic do-gooders sometimes dedicate almost all of their waking hours to helping their students.
Arne Duncan actually called those Central Falls school officials courageous. They sound vindictive and foolish to me. In the end those teachers were rehired, although I’m sure a few had moved on and were replaced by inexperienced teachers. What was the result of that grandstanding? Not a lot. Currently on Schooldigger.com, the school is 55th out of 59 high schools. See https://www.schooldigger.com/go/RI/schools/0012000026/school.aspx for more straight lines across sad graphs that indicate no significant improvement.
The point I’d like to make here is this: At the end of the day, it’s almost never the teachers. It never was the teachers. We are blaming teachers for a host of results, many of which are not in their control. More and more, I talk to teachers and they tell me they think they can’t win. No matter what or how much they do, they expect to be criticized for not doing enough. The scary part is that when I look at events like that Rhode Island purge, I think they may be right.
Looking for improvement over the course of a year is perfectly rational. Teachers should be able to demonstrate their students are gaining at least a year’s knowledge overall in the course of a year, with the understanding that slow learners, bilingual students and others may not be able to hit that target for perfectly valid reasons. But I’m betting those high school teachers found themselves in a situation similar to the one I found myself in the year before I threw up my hands and retired.
Teachers cannot magically transport students up across multiple years of unknown content with a wave of a magic wand. If we could teach 4 or more years of the mathematical curriculum in one year, despite the absurd amounts of time lost to testing, we would not be in this mess. That kid who entered tenth grade doing math at a fourth grade level cannot be expected to catch up to the curriculum underpinning that standardized test — not without massive amounts of tutoring — tutoring poor districts cannot afford even if the extra time, staff and busses required could somehow be found. The very idea that classrooms should be expected to make this leap represents a triumph of faith over science and reason.
When our students have fallen far behind for reasons partially or entirely outside a teacher’s control, such as frequent moves, lack of family support, lack of English-language skills, dyslexia or other impediments to reading, homelessness, frequent hospitalizations, various special education indicators, such as severe ADHD, and a host of other factors that undercut our children’s educations — what happens to teachers when we blame the teachers for those children’s poor standardized test performances?
Because that was exactly what happened in Rhode Island. What was wrong with those teachers in Central Falls, Rhode Island? I’d like to suggest that in many cases nothing was wrong, other than the fact that they had been foolish enough to try to teach in a disadvantaged school district in a time of witch hunts.
In the sixteenth century, we identified witches using signs such as cat ownership, the ability to float in water, big moles or birthmarks, or moldy butter or milk in the house. In the twenty-first century, we identify “substandard teachers” by looking at their students’ test scores. Using those test scores for that purpose is probably every bit as scientifically valid as burning women who own cats.
It’s tantamount to tying a teacher’s hands to her feet and throwing her in the water to see if she will float. And, oh damn, are a lot of teachers drowning! The drowned are taking real estate courses, working social media to find an alternate career, or just attending therapy sessions while they try to find a medication to staunch their anxiety. Their luckier counterparts are enjoying early retirement while doing watercolors and baking bread.
Reader, ask yourself: How do you think those fired teachers in Central Falls slept after the mass firing? Officials read those teachers’ names aloud to a crowd in a mass firing presumably intended to shame them all. Imagine being one of the teachers in that national story. Suddenly, after giving decades of your life to children, bureaucrats pull your job — maybe the only job you know how to do — right out from under you, pointing fingers of blame directly at you despite the fact that you have been fighting your hardest against forces as strong as poverty, hunger and homelessness.
Teachers were left to wonder how they would pay their mortgages. What would they do next? How do you think those teachers are sleeping now, rehired or not? PTSD anyone? When you dedicate your whole life to helping kids, not the easy kids who live in the land of student lounges with flat-screen TVs and amply endowed college funds, but the kids who are locked in a long, uphill struggle that may have included ten new school districts by fifth grade, what do those standardized test-based teacher evaluations do?
Eduhonesty: Administrators would tell readers they try to take into account student differences in teacher evaluations. We may be living the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party out here, yet we still have many competent principals and superintendents. The best administrators are informed by data, but not driven to hasty conclusions based on numbers that don’t mean what they are supposed to mean.
But those state test score numbers were used to justify the firings in Central Falls. They have been used to hammer many teachers, schools and districts, both formally and informally over the last decade. Certain educational and government leaders have become enamored of data-driven instruction, and I support data-driven instruction: HOWEVER, DATA-DRIVEN DECISIONS ONLY SERVE THE GREATER GOOD WHEN PEOPLE GENUINELY UNDERSTAND THE DATA!
Let me throw in a personal example: I have had two new principals tell me directly they needed to pull up their school’s standardized test scores to keep their jobs. Both lasted two years, I believe. One may have made three. I moved on before she was done. One problem with the administrative revolving door is that principals don’t know their teachers. But those new principals do know that they must make sure no one perceives them as “soft” on teachers who are not making those scores go up, I called my last principal “The Gunslinger from Texas.” She took my welfare to heart toward the end of the year but, oh my God, was she scary when she started. She came out blasting in all directions. And it was all about pushing test score numbers up,
By October, I had a resignation letter waiting in the glovebox of my car. I managed to hold on until year’s end for the kids’ sakes and extra retirement benefits, but it was close some days. I was fed up.
As I read this, I am afraid that if government and educational leaders were confronted with what I just wrote, they would come up with a national program to teach statistics to bureaucrats rather than doing the right thing:
We have to get these annual test numbers out of teacher and principal evaluations. It’s too easy to drown hard-working, good people with those numbers.
(I actually think the gunslinger from Texas was trying to do her best in a situation where she was going to be evaluated on numbers she did not yet understand. unfortunately, by the time she did figure out what the numbers were saying, she’d already done a lot of shooting.)
P. S. Non-teacher reader, I have one idea I furiously want to get over the plate: When I am teaching seventh grade and I get a student who enters my class reading at a second-grade level and doing math a third-grade level, I should not be held responsible for her annual state test scores. That test has been designed to match a curriculum that has zero to do with what that girl knows and everything to do with a government agenda that completely ignores many decades of research into child development. Even if I advance that girl multiple years academically, those advances may not be visible in the annual standardized test. The material in the test is simply too far above where she is operating. She can’t read the test, dammit. and if that’s a big problem for me, well, it’s a much bigger problem for her. She’s the one telling me, “I’m just dumb,” while I try to motivate her and do damage control.
P. S.S. The worst part of all this is I am sure some people understand using test scores as a measure of teacher quality has long been USELESS and a no-win scenario for teachers in socioeconomically depressed areas. They know. I can only assume they don’t care.
Wishing all my readers a great week! J. S. L. Turner