By Tamara

Imagine: You are fifteen years old, recently in arrived in the U.S. from Bhutan, just enrolled in the tenth grade at the local high school and HAVE NEVER ATTENDED SCHOOL BEFORE. By the way, the district expects you to meet all requirements to graduate in four years. The state expects you to exit the transitional-bilingual program in three years. Yes, you will get to attend survival English classes and learn how to hold a pencil for a semester. Yes, you will receive sheltered instruction for your English and Social Studies classes. We would love to offer you primary language support in Integrated Math and Physical Science, but we don't have a translator for you language, so you are on your own. But don't worry, if you don't pass you can make up the credit either in summer school or online. In the mean time time your well-meaning math or science teacher finds you a dual language English-Bhutanese dictionary. Oops, you never learned to read in Bhutanese…

Recently the English Language Development program in my district has landed in the hot seat because we have a critical mass of students not passing the HSPE or graduating on time (contributing to an already dismal graduation rate). This wasn't always the case. Ten years ago most of our English Language Learners came from former Soviet Block countries or Bosnia. Most were well educated in their primary language. Many were already bi or tri-lingual. Their acquisition of English mostly consisted of skill transfer between languages. But over the past five years we have had an influx of students from Central and Southeast Asia, East Africa and the Victoria Lakes region and Iraq. Many of these areas are war-torn. All experience profound poverty. School doesn't make it onto Maselow's heirarchy.

Educating adolescents who have experienced the horrors of war and hunger with no opportunity to go to school is a patently different ball game. It often feels like a fool's errand trying to lay the foundation for literacy while simultaneously imparting grade-level content knowledge. Oh, and explaining the weird things Americans do-like Halloween. But my students are hungry for knowledge and desperate to communicate. And they work at it with urgency.

Over the summer there were rumors of talk about developing five and six year graduation plans based on a student's age and literacy level on arrival to the country. I hope it goes beyond talk. These kids (and their family's lives) depend on their being able to navigate a literate English-speaking society. That takes TIME. Well established research holds it takes SEVEN to TEN years to develop cognitive academic language proficiency in a second language. How can we justifiably expect graduation in four years from students who arrive pre-literate at fifteen?

By Tracey

I'm a huge fan of the Moth podcast.  If you haven't heard of it before, it's a collection of true stories told live, without notes.  I was listening recently and heard the story, My Unhurried Legacy, by Kyp Malone.  The story is a good reminder that the children we teach are, often times, small replicas of their own parents, fated, or perhaps doomed, by genetics.  The story is about a man whose daughter begins kindergarten.  Without giving too much away, the teacher has some concerns.  But, the "concerns" were him.  He had the same issues growing up.  He recognizes himself in his daughter, and realizes where this will lead if he keeps her in her current classroom with a teacher who doesn't understand them.  

The story stuck with me for days, as I began the school year and met my new students.  Two and half weeks into the school year, I've started having some "concerns."  As I pick up the phone to talk with parents, I remember Kyp Malone's story.  I might just be speaking to an older and more experienced version of my student; and so I tread carefully.  I should anyway.  I'm OK with that.  But, I wonder if, in today's high stakes testing environment, these "concerns" might be interpreted differently.  Are they intensified by the need for all students to reach standard?  Even for students as young as kindergarten?  

Luckily for Kyp and his daughter, he was able to pull her out of the classroom and send her to a Waldorf school.  For what shouldn't feel like a utopian view on assessment, but does, I recommend reading the Waldorf school's approach, Assessment without Testing.  Just don't look up their tuition rates. 

By Mark

The first week of school as I introduced a vocabulary unit to my seniors, I sparked a conversation that inadvertenly revealed the attitudes toward education we have bred into our students.

I was talking to the students about the upcoming vocabulary unit, and asked them to put themselves in the teacher's shoes: what kind of assessment would be best to prove to the teacher that the students really understood the words.

At first, the answers were disheartening: make us match words with definitions, make us do a multiple choice test where we pick the word to fit the given definition. Then I posed this to them: what good is that kind of test?

Their reply: it shows we've memorized the definition.

And my reply: "What good is that?"

Their return: it shows we know what the word means.

And I asked, "Does it really?"

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By Tom

Recently I was part of a radio show. It was on BAM Radio, which I think is only broadcast over the internet. Our host was Rae Pica and the topic was teacher advocacy. Besides me, there was Anthony Cody, who blogs at Living in Dialog and who was instrumental in planning the Save Our School March in Washington DC; Karen Horwitz, who wrote a book about teacher abuse after she was fired from her teaching position; and Marilyn Anderson Rhames, who blogs at Charting My Own Course and teaches science at a charter school in Chicago. 

I won't say too much about the content, since you can listen to it yourself. One thing you'll notice is that all four of us have strikingly different opinions on the issue of teacher advocacy.

Enjoy!

By Mark

I teach high school English. At our inservice meetings this past week, last spring's HSPE scores were unveiled. Our 10th graders passed the reading HSPE at a rate of 91.7%, above the state average of 85.1%. Bolstering our pride even more, 75.3% of our 474 tested sophomores earned an L4 score, the highest bracket of scores. Out of all 474 students, only six scored L1 ("well below standard"). While we certainly still need to keep finding ways to support those kids who don't yet have skills up to standard, those numbers are pretty good. Data doesn't lie, right?

Something to celebrate, right?

Nope. The data, when read properly, actually proves that we failed. We failed miserably.

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by Rena Mincks

Once again my district is mandating a top down decision. The powers that be have just decided to join the RTI (Response to Intervention) acronym band wagon. Yes, I know it has been around for about 10 years or so, but now there seems to be some funding opportunities, so why not?

Well, I will attempt to say why not. First a bit of history, as I understand it, RTI was an attempt by Special Education to fix General Education. IDEA realized that there were just too many referrals and too many students in Special Ed. Therefore, let’s test students so we have enough data points, plot and graph these points, and then suggest an intervention that will “fix” this student before having the student receiving special education services.

So now, my little first grade students (average age 6) will not have a DIBELS (Dynamic Indicator of Basic Early Literacy Skills) and MAP (Measures of Academic Progress). The MAP test is done on the computer. This data will then be used to qualify students for Title One reading support or further testing for Special Ed. Consideration.

We have been in school four full days and I can already tell you which students will do just fine, which students need additional opportunities to learn and time to practice phonics, phonemic awareness, reading, addition, subtraction, measurement, number and letter writing, and which students will need accommodations to challenge them.

It is difficult to see students unable to use the computer lab for approximately twelve weeks a year due to testing. I believe most teachers can arrive at the same conclusions with out waiting five weeks to receive data which that may or may not guide instruction. I would rather our district put forth some effort to look more closely at Universal Design for Learning. (http://www.udlcenter.org).

UDL looks at providing multiple means of representation, action and expression and engagement, not one intervention to fit all. It is about options and flexibility of educators. I think it is important to recognize that learners differ in ways that they can navigate a learning environment and express what they know. The tests my first grade students will be subjected to are just a moment in time a data point. I believe that my students are real people and much more than a point on a grid or graph. Let’s get back to educating children and not just collecting data, which takes precious time away from instruction, practice and learning. I will just treat this like a bandage, rip it off quickly and let the healing begin. I see the RTI as another plan that will fail due to the lack of funding or will just fade away and make room for the next acronym.

By Tamara

On the heels of two posts about Washington state's adoption of the common core standards comes an article in the New York TImes decrying those standards as the wrong way to improve U.S. students' math skills and "quantitative literacy". Sol Garfunkel (executive director of the Consortium for Mathmatics and its application) and David Mumford (emeritus professor of mathmatics at Brown) posit a more applied "real-life problem" approach to math would better equip students for 21st century careers and life in general.They argue a course of math study based on finance, data and basic engineering would improve basic skills and more realistically prepare students for work because "how often do most adults encounter a situation in which they need to solve a quadratic equation?" Such an applied math curriculum in their opinion would create what they call "quantitative literacy".Whereas in their estimation the Common Core Standards are, as Mark pointed out, a re-wording of what we have been doing for decades. According to Garfunkel and Mumford what we have been doing is not producing "quantitative literacy" and thus we are falling behind.

It is no secret that higher ed and industry find high school graduates woefully ill prepared for both upper level and applied math. So I have to wonder along with Mark, if the folks that get our graduates are questioning the value of Common Core standards, why have 40+ states signed on? Now full disclosure: I am a fan of nation-wide standards. Finland, Singapore and South Korea have completely turned around their education systems and achieved profound proficiency from their students in all disciplines after adopting national standards. We as teachers complain we are not consulted enough about decisions impacting what we do in the classroom. But do we in K-12 education seek to consult with higher ed and industry about decisions we make that impact their ability to work with our students? Perhaps the time has come for a sincere effort at "vertical alignment". Otherwise Mark may be on to something about the real winners in the Common Core Standards adoption being the test/textbook publishers.

By Tom

A few years ago I found myself on our school’s Mission Statement Task Force. After our first meeting, we were each told to return with a suggestion. I came up with “We’ll do what we can.” It seemed like the perfect blend of steel-toed optimism and existential dread. And weighing in at only five one-syllable words, it seemed likely that most of us could remember it.

Alas, it failed to gain any traction and was soundly defeated by a long string of edu-blather with enough mumbo-jargon to make Robert Marzano blush. And I’ll bet my next pay raise that you couldn’t find one person on staff that could recite our mission statement at gunpoint.

I was thinking about my tenure on this task force last week while exploring the Center for Education Data and Research’s (CEDR) new web-based tool that compares Washington State school districts using every imaginable statistic. But there’s a twist: acknowledging that poverty has a profound effect on academic achievement, CEDR’s Dan Golhaber and his research team use complicated math to “control for the percent of students receiving free or reduced priced meals in a district to provide a more balanced comparison of district performance.” The result is an interactive tool that lets you see how well a district is doing, independent of their level of poverty.

I had fun with it. And after an hour or so, I was able to conclude that there are vast differences in the performance of districts, even when you control for the level of poverty. That was clear. My own district, for example, doesn’t fare so well. And I’m sure this will lead to a lot of soul-searching within our leadership, followed by a few well-placed phone calls across the state to see what we could be doing better in regards to professional development and curriculum acquisition. Their first call might well go out to the Highline School District.

Highline lies noisily under the SeaTac Airport flight path, and according to the data, they perform well above what would be predicted, given their demographics. Highline serves cheap lunch to over 65% of their students, many of whom are still learning English. When the Michelle Rhee’s of the world talk about how “some people in education are climbing mountains every day,” They’re talking about the people who work for Highline Public Schools.  

But when I hear this, I often wonder what would happen if you applied the same effort put forth by those mountain climbers towards a population that wasn’t so needy. Instead of mountains, what would happen if hard-working teachers only had to climb a few low-lying hills?

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By Mark

For almost a decade, half of my daily schedule has been part of an intervention "program" which is aimed at helping kids transition from middle school to high school. I put "program" in quotes because really all it boils down to is a group of like-minded teachers who've managed to advocate for a little bit smaller class sizes, collaboration time, and some flexibility in an elective class period where we can teach what we call "high school survival skills."

We've had to fight advocate each year to keep from losing the things that we know make the program a success. Though we have generally good support from our administration, they of course have to balance our requests with hundreds of other teacher and program requests. The model that we've now developed is rooted in several key philosophies, but one of them is that students need to be taught how to be students. Like in kindergarten, when some of the first lessons are about sitting in your chair and raising your hand to speak, we try to anticipiate and diagnose what fundamental skills a new high schooler needs to survive. Sometimes this means sitting down on the floor with a kid and cleaning out his backpack to help him develop some kind of organizational system. Sometimes this means practicing unpacking test questions or writing prompts by underlining or annotating. Sometimes this means doing a time inventory to help students develop time management skills. Test taking skills, typing skills, reading remediation, math support, active studying skills… the list goes on and on.

What is sad is that when we explain these lessons to some people (including teachers), their response is that kids should already know this stuff and that we are wasting our time.

And then some of them, unaware of the irony, go on to complain about how their students bombed the last quiz or flopped on the last essay.

To me, this illuminates a problem I see again and again, perhaps driven by the testing movement, perhaps not: we are good at teaching who, what, when, where (and sometimes why) but we often forget about how. That how is not how to build an engine or how to use a formula, but how to be a student. Too often I wonder if we assume kids will fill in that gap themselves. I recall many lunchroom conversations with teachers of all disciplines who vent about students not studying for a given test. I always ask "what did you to do teach them how to to study?" For some teachers, that is an a-ha! moment, for others, they dismiss my comment with something like "that isn't my job." I have the same battle with teachers (of all disciplines, including English) who complain about poor quality writing when all they've done is assign a prompt rather than teach how to write.

With all else we are asked to do, spending some time on how to be a student is one piece of the puzzle that I think is sometimes an afterthought, is forgotten, or is even outright dismissed as a waste. To me it is no different than teaching kindergarteners to raise their hands nicely and wait their turn: if we want a behavior to be performed consistently and successfully, we need to teach it and not just assume the kid will figure it out. That includes teaching students how to be good students.