By Tom

I caught a rainbow trout yesterday. A beautiful animal; sixteen inches of fin, muscle and poor judgment. It was a blast, but when I reflect on this accomplishment (Which I have been doing a lot) I realize that by myself, there would have been no trout. A lot of other people were involved. Obviously, the trout itself played an active, yet unwilling role, but there was also Dave, who was steering the canoe and telling me where to cast. There was my lovely wife, who was watching the kids back at the campground. There was the guy at the fly shop, who told me which gear to use. And the list goes on, all the way to the Fish and Wildlife Department, which manages the river.

So why the fish story?

Mostly because I like to brag, but there’s also an educational connection. You see, our school learned about our test scores this week. And unlike my fishing trip, it wasn’t all rainbow trout and sunshine.
Some scores went up and some went down. Way down. And like teachers everywhere, we congratulated ourselves for our successes and felt miserable about our "non-successes."

I think it’s good that we, as teachers, take test scores personally. Good teachers understand and use feedback all the time; it’s how we grow and learn. And to the extent that test scores measure how well our students learned last year, these scores tell us how well we performed. But we need to remember that there is an entire educational system out there, and we are only one (albeit very important) part of it.

First of all, there’s the students. Some are willing, and some, like my trout, aren’t. That matters. There’s the parents. Most do an outstanding job of preparing our students and supporting what we do in the classroom. Some don’t. We have principals who lead us and keep us all together, making sure twenty or more different classrooms are all functioning as a whole. We have teacher leaders, who bridge the gap between what principals can do and what teachers need by way of support to do their jobs effectively.

Then there are the players who work beyond the school: The district-level administrators and support staff, who do what they do to keep the schools open and functioning; the school boards, who make executive decisions about curriculum and personnel; higher ed people, who not only prepare our beginning and post-graduate teachers, but also conduct and articulate the research that informs those of us in the classrooms of what we should be doing while we’re in there. There are the curriculum writers, who produce the tools we use everyday. There are the state officials, who write the standards as well as the tests by which we measure our students; and the federal folks, who send the Title 1 funds and write the rules by which we can spend them. And there are the various organizations that focus on increasing the capacity of teachers. Organizations like NCATE, NEA, NBPTS, ASCD, NSCD. And let’s not forget the non-profits like CSTP, whose ultimate goal is to increase student learning. Which, after all, is the only real goal of all the people and organizations I’ve just mentioned.

And so everyone, from the students on up, needs to celebrate and anguish over the scores that are coming out this time of year. And then get past that and focus on doing what has to be done to improve them. That’s everyone’s job. Including mine. We all own these results; the good and the bad

So thanks for the memory, Mr. Trout. (Or Mrs; I couldn’t really tell) I had fun catching you, but right now I’ve got something far more important to focus on. I look forward to catching you again next summer, by the way. But not without the support of the rest of my team.