By Mark

The new buzzphrase in my neck of the woods is "Response to Intervention." I know it's been around a while, and I know that RTI can take many forms, but a few recent uncomfortable conversations in the lunchroom have let me to wonder: at what cost do we respond to students who struggle?

My building, like many, has crafted means to "intervene" when it is discovered that students are struggling academically in core graduation requirements.  

First off, I am part of a teaching team in an intervention program for 9th graders. The goal is to help students transition into high school by learning study skills, organization and time management–in other words, how to be a student–all the while providing mainstream coursework in order to keep the bar high and keep opportunities open for the students' futures. However, participating in this program means that the students lose one of their half-year electives in order to participate in the program's support period. This means fewer students in art, technology, and P.E. electives. And this obviously impacts those programs and their staff.

Further, our math department has worked hard to craft during-the-school day as well as after-school opportunities for students who struggle in math to achieve greater success since, though our building scores are above the state average, math scores have not had the kind of growth or progress the teachers would like to see. The most aggressive and focused of these interventions is that certain struggling (mainstream) students are given a second mathematics class during their day's schedule. This intervention provides greater one-on-one or small-group support in core math skills necessary for achieving what is required by the state in mathematics. This means that the student now takes an extra math class instead of another elective. This means fewer students in art, technology, and P.E. electives. And this obviously impacts those programs and their staff.

Too often when I'd hear about how the testing movement saps the life out of the arts, music, and P.E. (among other subjects), I would assume that this was in the context of an elementary situation where a teacher with finite but flexible time was being pushed to devote more to the tested disciplines. Now I see that the same is starting to happen at the secondary level as well.

Those uncomfortable conversations I mentioned above have been with elective teachers who shared with me the impact that interventions are having on their courses and enrollment. If nothing else, we're talking FTE and job security here, so certainly people have the right to be impassioned. Besides that, there is the common belief that many kids who struggle in core courses thrive in the arts, technology, and vocational courses…and that the latter are what make them even want to come to school. Overriding all this is the tacit (or not so tacit) message that the only things that matter are the things the state tests us on.

It is easy to blame the Big Test movement and related requirements for these decisions that short-change electives. However, it should force us to re-examine exactly what is the purpose of a comprehensive high school. Is it to ready students for the Big Tests in reading, writing, math, and science? Must something be tested in order to have value? Should the arts be an option only after the Big Tests have been passed? Should the Test trump all?

When kids struggle, what price are we willing to make them pay to get them to pass that Test?

There are many dirty little secrets we teachers would prefer not to discuss. Maybe it’s that stack of papers which never got graded so you just gave everyone points. Maybe it’s the mastery with which you pretend to know a former student’s name when you run into them ten years later in a Wal-Mart with their own kids. 

One of mine which I’ve had to admit to myself lately: I don’t really care all that much about state or national standards. As all the education sites and blogs erupted with commentary about the recent declaration that the national core standards are better than most states’ standards, I tried as much as I could to get fired up, but I couldn’t do it.

Sure, these lists of standards are useful for framing my scope and sequence each year. I go through each unit to cross check that I’m covering what the law tells me to. When these standards get revised by some committee in some board room, do I have to re-write my whole curriculum? Surprisingly, their continuous wordsmithing doesn’t change much on my end.  

Perhaps since I teach language arts (which tends to lean toward skills standards rather than content standards) I’m in a different world. I don’t mean this question to be facetious or to imply my disagreement with them in principle, but: why do we pay so much attention to these encapsulated nuggets of teacherspeak called standards? Will a change in wording in Olympia or D.C. mean I will teach differently and suddenly be better at my job? Will telling bad teachers to pay more attention to standards make their students learn more or better? Or is it all public relations? If we just phrase these statements the right way, will all the ills of public education be resolved?

What is the big deal with standards? Why do we expend so much energy on them, care so much about them, and hang our hopes upon them? I want to hear your side.

For my English 9 Final exam, my freshmen were to write a literary analysis essay which compares the stages of the archetypal hero’s journey in Homer’s Odyssey with the corresponding stages in a recent film of their choice. Simply placing the two side by side was not enough–they had to actually deconstruct and analyze. They had to cite text evidence and learn to paraphrase scenes from the film in order to use specifics to support their comparisons. They had to draw inferences, seek common threads, and extend those threads beyond art into the universal truths revealed by the archetypal hero and his journey.

All last week, we did prewriting activities in class, reviewed effective introductions and conclusions, practiced paragraphing, paraphrasing, transitions and analytical commentaries. We discussed how to select evidence to support a proposition, and we examined old drafts of past assignments. These skills, this thinking, is what we’ve practiced all school year.

Monday, during the two-hour block, the students were provided computers to word-process and polish their final drafts, based on their hand-written notes. 

I told them my expectations were high. I told them that A’s would be rare, that I would be hard to please. I asked if they felt prepared for the challenge, and they said yes. And then they did something that startled me.

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I absolutely hate the phrase “teacher accountability.”

Don’t get me wrong–I’m not in favor of protecting bad teachers. What I am in favor of is systems which make teachers better. That, to me, is what people think they mean when they talk about “teacher accountability.” But that’s not how “teacher accountability” actually manifests. 

It manifests in only one way which can be summed up in one word: “punishment.” 

And the theory that punishment makes me better at my job is more than a bit misguided.

A recent Edweek.org article by James Stigler begins by making a similar point. He explained that the current push toward “accountability” through only end-product evaluation and levying of punishment is actually proven to harm productivity and effectiveness:

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