(Readers, please pass this on. I have not told such an explicit truth in awhile.)

By high school, the attractive, Hispanic boy who wrote School Principal #4 had become a struggle, a source of frequent disciplinary infractions. I’d be surprised to find out he graduated. This quick opening paragraph he wrote in middle school explains his high school hostility when we read between the lines.

When I become school principal, I want to change the school so it can improve and become a better school to learn in. And when I become principal I can make the school fun and cool. And I think the kids should learn and studied. that’s why when I become the principal the class periods are not going that long and all the classes are going to be easy. And the kids can enjoy themselves in class. Sometimes if I was the principal of the school I would let the students have free time after. If I become school principal I would have a McDonald’s in the school.

I see much more in this letter than a bilingual student with slightly fractured English. That “free time after” probably refers to open gym, to allowing kids to use the facilities after hours for fun, social events. Having taught this boy in both middle school and high school later, I find this letter extremely sad.

In middle school, my student still wanted to learn. He wanted to improve the school. At first appearance, he may seem unmotivated with his desire for shorter, easy classes. I know that’s not true.

He did not want an easy ride as much as he wanted a comprehensible, useful school day. By the time this boy hit middle school, No Child Left Behind penalties were in full play. The curriculum was being set to match the expected state test. That curriculum did not match my student’s learning levels. He was always lost. Many students in the school were lost and they only became further lost as the bar kept being raised higher. He came in for tutoring sometimes, but I watched him giving up. Bit by bit, he decided he did not have what it took to succeed academically.

I am angry for this boy. I am angry for his peers. I am angry at those upper-middle class, boneheaded bumblers in the district board office who demanded that I use common lesson plans that did not match my student’s learning levels. I am angry about the mandatory tests that no one could read. I am angrier about the textbook that the Assistant Superintendent picked over the recommendations of his committee of math teachers, who had recommended a more accessible book. “This book has the rigor we need,” he said. That translated to page after page of unreadable story problems set at a mathematical level four years above the average entering level of my students according to MAP tests.

An unreadable book might as well be no book. We could have used that book money much better. Hell, buying bushels of erasable markers would have used that money better.

Eduhonesty: I’m coming out of my fog here and it’s a little scary. My last year, I shut down since nothing I said ever seemed to make any difference and, more often than not, my protests created trouble for me. “No Excuses!” that featherbrain of an Assistant Principal would say when I pointed out that my students could not do common lesson plan openers that involved mathematical processes they had never learned — not until I taught the missing processes. “No excuses!” he would say when a student whose English was at a first grade level could not explain to him the seventh grade mathematical processes I was supposed to be teaching her. I think I had an alright relationship with the Assistant Superintendent until he insisted I should be using more of the resources provided me and I pointed out that my students could not read most of those resources, a fact which obliged me to create or find alternative materials. “We need more rigor,” he said. Well, yes, but only so many students can leap four years of missing instruction in a single bound. A few can. A few, with lots of extra tutoring, did. I taught furiously, helping them to make those leaps.

But the student who wrote the above paragraph?  We buried the kids like him with our rigor and our unreadable books. No wonder the district high school continues to be a drop-out factory. Another Superintendent is leaving. They all leave, at a rate of almost one a year. I hear the Assistant Superintendent is expected to take over.

Oh, God. Those poor kids. At least in our financially- and academically-disadvantaged districts, I believe rigor may be the death of American education.