Does the McCleary Ruling Have Teeth?

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I wondered this a long time ago.

Earlier this month, the Washington State Supreme Court issued a nine-page evaluation of the legislature's fulfillment of its obligation to meet its consititutional and paramount duty to amply fund public education–which as a reminder, is what the ruling in McCleary, et al. v State of Washington concluded back in 2012.

You have to wonder what the Supreme Court will, or even can, do if the legislature doesn't take appropriate action. Even though several of our legislators believe that the Court has overstepped its authority, as this article from the Seattle Times mentions, there are some other states where the highest court issued orders to their state legislature to take action to rectify some discordance. From the Times (linked above):

The reality is, no one knows exactly what the court would do.

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1080 Instructional Hours?

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Timeby Maren Johnson

I'm not the counselor at the school.  I'm not the one out there telling people alcohol is bad. I'm the one at the end of the line trying to save the teenager's life after they have had too much to drink.

~Guest speaker in my science classes last week, my brother, an ER physician, talking about the effects of drug overdoses.

I was extremely appreciative of my brother for taking the time to come into my classes for the day and share his stories and knowledge with my high school science students.  The information he presented was scientific, relevant, and interesting—a great use of instructional time.

It was also interesting to hear his reaction, as someone outside the education system, at being a "teacher for a day."  While I was there to introduce him and provide some moderation of his presentation and student questions, my brother was essentially serving as a guest teacher for the entire school day.

So what were some of my brother’s impressions?  He remarked on the diversity of student backgrounds and attitudes.  (I teach all the tenth graders at my school.  Every one.)  Describing how he felt at the end of the day, he said, “I was tired.”

"I was surprised by the pace of the day.  The bell rings, and the students leave.  Immediately a new group of students come in, and within four minutes, the bell rings and the next class starts.  There's no time to think."  This was my brother, an ER physician, saying he was surprised by the pace of the school day.  My brother is a busy guy at work, so for him to say the day was fast paced tells you something!

There is clearly no extra time in our school day.  A new law would extend the number of instructional hours to 1080 annually in grades 7-12, and would not allow early releases or late starts for collaboration or professional development to count towards that 1080 hours.

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Why Tests Aren’t the Point of Education

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ImagesCA3LWQ7SBy Kristin

Every summer, we go to the lake to swim, and my daughters have to pass a swim test before they can go beyond the rope to the deep water, where it's fun.

Like being able to swim, and not drowning in deep water, being able to read and do math to a certain level of aptitude is important in our society.  Tests were written that measure whether or not a child has basic skills at certain points in her school career.

In the hysteria and panic following our realization that children who live in poverty, predominantly children of color, aren't meeting minimum standards of skill, we've focused more and more on the test.  That's unfortunate. We haven't lengthened the school day or year, reduced class size for those students, or put any money into summer training of teachers.  Instead, we're simply told to test more, and we're told the test results have real consequences.

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Why I support SB 6082

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Education, Education Policy, Elementary

ImagesBy Tom

One of the ironies of my job is how lonely it sometimes feels. I’m surrounded by kids all day long, yet I seldom get to talk to the teacher who works right next to me in the hallway. That irony was brought home last week when I noticed some of her kids working in the hall on a social studies project involving Native Americans. As it happened, my class was also studying Northwest Tribes, and both classes would have undoubtedly benefitted had the two of us planned that unit together, instead of in total isolation.

But unless Olympia does something, it’s only going to get worse.

Currently, students have to receive 1000 hours of instruction per year. But this only has to be a district average, which means some kids have more than a thousand, some less. According to legislation passed last year, next year’s students are supposed to have six hours of instruction per day, 180 days per year. That works out to 1080 hours. That’s for secondary students; for elementary students the total has to be 1000 hours.

Teachers, for the most part, will probably not notice the increase in hours. What they will notice, however, is the DECREASE in collaborative time. Take my district, for example. We have a waiver from the state to convert five of those 180 days into professional development days, which are divided into district-wide PD, building time, collaborative time and individual time. The thinking is that the decrease in instructional time is offset by the benefits gained through the professional development of the teachers. Up until now, the state has agreed with that thinking and granted our district a waiver, year in and year out.

Last year the Legislature changed the law. But this is the same Legislature that passed TPEP, which includes a mandate for teachers to collaborate. Districts like mine, therefore, are stuck in the position of mandating that teachers work together, yet will be unable to provide time for that to happen.

Enter SB 6082, sponsored by Senators McAuliffe and McCoy. This bill simply includes language that allows teacher collaboration to count as part of those 1000 or 1080 hours. (By the way; recess, passing time and parent-teacher conferences are already counted.) This doesn’t address the issue of district time, building time and individual time, but it does allow teachers to work collaboratively.

There are other ways to increase collaborative time, of course, but they involve money. And it’s looking more and more like the Legislature is holding tight to the purse-strings. Which is why SB 6082 was introduced.

It makes total sense. If we value teacher collaboration – and we apparently do, since it’s mandated by law – then we should include it in the school day.

And maybe I’ll be a little less lonely.

At least there’s one school that won’t be wasting time on test-prep this year

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Assessment, Education, Education Policy, Elementary

Wasting-timeBy Tom

In years past, February marks the beginning of “Test-Prep Season” in my classroom. It isn’t all we do, of course, but I try to weave activities and practice assessments into my plans, gradually increasing the intensity throughout the late winter and early spring until mid-April, when it’s basically an all-out siege.

But not this year.

This year I’m not doing of that. This year I’m teaching, and my students are learning, all year long; including the second half of April.

And here’s why: this year our school board decided that each school in our district (Edmonds) could decide how they wanted to transition from the MSP to the Smarter Balanced Assessment. Option one was to take both. Option two was to take only the MSP. Option three was to field test the SBA and not take the MSP. We chose option three, in the most lopsided vote we’ve ever had, even though the results of the SBA would not be released.

I voted with the majority on this one; in fact I was a leading voice in the discussion that preceded the vote. Option one, taking both tests, seemed ridiculous. Our faculty is trying to become familiar with the CCSS, and that takes time. Getting the students ramped up for another round of MSPs also takes time, and time is the scarcest resource we have. It also takes time for students to become familiar with the new standards, which is what they’re doing this year. Taking two tests on two different sets of standards seemed like a bad idea.

Option two, taking only the MSP, was another non-starter. In order for our students and staff to get a handle on the new standards, it seemed imperative that we get a chance to see the new assessment this year. Besides that, the new tests are all on-line, and piloting the tests will give us a chance to see if our technology can handle the demand. Furthermore, we wanted to have our students’ scores become part of the pilot pool. We have a relatively high-need population; when it comes time to set the benchmarks, it’s good to have a broad student base.

But the most important reason for me was the simplest one. I love to teach and I love to watch my students learn. Test-prep is not teaching and taking practice tests is not really learning. And when you’re in a classroom and you’re not teaching or you’re not learning, you’re wasting your time.

I hate wasting time.

Speed Dating and Student Work: Half Days and a Senate Bill

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Assessment, Education Policy, Life in the Classroom, Science

Stopwatchby Maren Johnson

We sat down at a table in the science classroom at 2:30, just 10 minutes after the bell rang at the end of the school day.  We were ready to go: three teachers looking at student work.  Oh wait, there’s a student at the door who needs an assignment—one of us went to help him, the rest continued on.  What were we up to?  We were trying to collaborate, and we only had twenty minutes.  One of our members had volunteered to facilitate, and we even had an informal agenda: 5 minutes—introduce the lesson and provide background.  10 minutes—follow a simplified high-medium-low protocol for finding characteristics of the student work.  5 minutes—debrief.  

Partway through the high-medium-low protocol, a recently graduated student appeared at the door with a big grin, coming back to our high school to say hello.  We were happy to see him (he was a very jolly student)—we wished him well and sent him on to visit the math teacher.  Then we continued looking at the student work!  2:50 rolled around—we got up and left the room.  None of us usually leave the school at 2:50, the end of the contracted day, but on that day, I had another appointment, and needed to go, meaning that our collaboration time truly was limited to twenty minutes.  Twenty minutes is the length of time collaboration would have to be if it were to fit within the normal school day, with no early release, late start, or other modified schedule.

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Growth, and then…

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Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy, Life in the Classroom

Rock and rollBy Mark

Two steps forward, one step back. Climbing a hill of sand. Sisyphus without the deceitfulness.

Or, January in my classroom.

For the three weeks prior to winter break, we all worked very hard in room 116. By the time the quiz rolled around, we'd practiced, reviewed, self-assessed, strategized, tried new approaches, and for the most part, achieved the goal. On my proficiency level scale for identification and analysis of figurative language, the data was finally–finally–showing not just growth, but mastery.

Interpreting abstract figurative language is difficult enough for grown ups, let alone for adolescents who struggle to even understand overtly stated concrete concepts. Add to that the fact that interpretation of figurative language hinges tremendously on a reader's prior schema and life experiences upon which to draw and adolescents are set up to struggle. Nonetheless, through practice, diverse examples, more practice, and trial and error, growth happened by December 20th.

And then it went away.

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Thirty Million Words

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Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy, Elementary, Parent Involvment, Social Issues

LogoBy Tom

There’s a kid in my class who I’ll call Arthur. Although he’s in fourth grade, he started the year reading at about the first grade level and his math skills were even lower. He wrote nothing. When we discussed his situation during a September Child Study meeting we decided to “pull out all the stops.” And so we did. Arthur gets pulled out for one-on-one phonics lessons every day from 9:30 to 10:00. He goes directly from there to his small-group reading lesson with our special ed teacher. From 11:30 to noon he receives in-class support for writing and organization skills. At 2:15 he gets an hour of math support.

That’s pretty much “all the stops.” Fortunately, he has started to making progress; if you were to draw a line representing his academic growth since September, it would have an upwards trajectory. But if that line were a ski slope, you would not tremble at the top. And as far behind as he was four months ago, he is even farther behind now; his classmates, after all, have also made progress, but at a faster rate.

It didn’t have to come to this. A famous study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley resulted in the Thirty Million Words Initiative. Simply put, they found that parent-child communication has an enormous impact on a child’s development and academic success. The name of the initiative reflects the optimal number of words a child should hear from his parents before entering school.

I have never met Arthur’s dad, and apparently neither has he. I have met his mother, though, on several occasions. She is very quiet, somewhat sullen, with the air of a person who looked at the low hand she was dealt and folded pretty early in the game. Which was about when Arthur was born.

Arthur is exactly the kind of student that TMW wants to prevent. Had his mother known how important it was to simply talk to her child, perhaps he wouldn’t be in his current circumstances. Perhaps I’d feel a little more certain that he’ll be in fifth grade next year. Perhaps his ski slope would be a little scarier.

We’ll never know. But I do know this: The most important thing non-teaching education stakeholders can do to support education in this country is to help parents help their children. And Thirty Million Words is an example of how simple that support can be. Talk, after all, is cheap. But apparently it’s pretty important, especially early in a child’s life.

Because sadly, fourth grade is a little bit too late.

Washington Teachers Still Sacrificing COLA

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20131230_153121By Kristin

Mr. Ungritch, my tenth grade geometry teacher, was a superstar.  He gave each of us nicknames, made us do push ups for goofing off, and allowed us to throw the whole year's work out the window in exchange for whatever score we earned on one final proof, drawn out of a hat and done on the board.  We loved him.  He was a superstar in another way, too – he never complained about being a teacher.  He didn't complain about the work load, the pay, or the parents.  He once said, "Teachers actually get paid really well, if you know how to live right." 

I have always remembered what a rare gift it was to have a teacher who was so content, and I've tried to follow his example.  I love my job.  I love my students and their parents.  I feel blessed to have great benefits, time off with my daughters, and a reliable paycheck.  I'm grateful to taxpayers, and I want to be worth my pay.

On the other hand, it has been a long time since voters approved a cost of living allowance, or COLA, for teachers with Initiative 732.  Over 60 percent of Washington voters said "yes" to giving educators in public k-12 schools, community colleges, and technical colleges a cost of living adjustment.  It was suspended in 2008 because there wasn't enough money.  Teachers didn't like that, but we are nothing if not public servants, so we accepted it.  We're still accepting it. 

 

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Can You Sue the State Over a Poor Education? Yes. You Can.

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B Vergaray Kristin

Students Matter, a national non-profit organization whose mission is to sponsor litigation that will improve education, will go to trial on January 27th in what will be a groundbreaking lawsuit.  Vergara vs. California is about educational inequity – that current dismissal, tenure, and evaluation systems cause "devastating consequences" for students who live in poverty.  The focus is on teacher quality and how current firing, RIF, and tenure systems work to keep ineffective teachers in classrooms, disproportionately in classrooms of high-poverty schools.

The plaintiffs in the case are nine public school children, ranging in age from eight to seventeen.  If Vergara wins, enormous change could happen.  Teacher quality and how to measure it is a hot topic here in Washington State, too.  The vague anecdotes fly back and forth – a terrible teacher shuffled from school to school and reading the paper at her desk, a brilliant teacher whose politics earned her the wrath of her principal and who was unfairly dismissed.  I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

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