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.

By Tamara

We currently have a 65% graduation rate in my district. Raising that rate has rightfully become the district’s top priority. Yet after my experience teaching summer school at the high school with the lowest graduation rate in the district, I question how administrators are pursuing increased on-time graduation.

My summer school students were mostly upper-classmen needing to retrieve freshman English credits. I was given a packet the students were to complete with the stipulation that as soon as students adequately finished said packet, I could pass them (all summer courses were pass/fail) and send them on their way. This was the expectation for every course offered regardless of subject. Check the box, pass go, collect your credit/diploma.

This approach to credit retrieval raised huge questions and flags for me:

1. If they struggled with the content/concepts the first time around, how was independently completing a packet with the same assignments going to produce success let alone learning or acquisition of skills?

2. If students know they can complete a semester’s worth of credit by completing a packet in a week (this was happening in a number of classes) why should they bother coming to class for 40 weeks during the regular school year? Especially in a neighborhood whose zip code is one of the poorest in the state. Their families often need them to work.

3. What does this kind of “box checking” do to the value of a diploma? We already have businesses and colleges screaming about kids not having adequate skills.

Because I wanted my students to gain confidence and experience success in an area they had struggled, I altered the packet and added additional assignments and assessments. I shared my rationale with them that if they struggled the first time, why do the exact same thing again. Let’s try a different approach to success. Their response was resigned at best, pissy at worst. One student said to me, “I was really looking forward to just completing the packet and getting on with my summer.”

And the real kicker? If they didn’t get the work done and pass the summer session, they could complete those packets in a special after-school “detention” class this fall. Um, accountability? When my eyebrows raised at this, the acting principal quickly pointed out that they needed to do whatever it took for kids to retrieve their credits, graduate on time, and get central administration off their back.

But I ask, at what cost? When expectations are no higher than completing a packet will any of these kids actually graduate with college or work ready skills? Have we given them the opportunity to develop the quality of perseverance or to value critical thinking? Has our (teachers and administrators) transparent goal of graduation by the most minimum standard foster a sense of achievement or even learning? Or have we sold them the idea that “success” is earned by checking a box.

2012-13 will be my twelfth year teaching English Language Development at the middle school. I am the wife of a middle school science teacher (just imagine what our dinnertime conversations revolve around), mother of two children just beginning their journey through K-12, and second language learner who can find every possible route around the subjunctive.
Education policy issues that get under my skin tend to revolve around what 21^st
century education should include and look like, how our decisions as adults
support (or not) kids’learning, and how we as an institution and as a
nation address the challenge of educating an evermore ethnically and
linguistically diverse student body.

By Tom

It was bound to happen. Sooner or later, the worst law since prohibition was destined to swallow my school. It was like watching a slow, stupid goat thoughtfully and systematically eating the neighbor's zinnias. And now it's finally happened; the fun and games are over: my school failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress.

This is our first year, so it's not so bad. We're only "on notice." But if things don't improve by next year we'll have to send  letters home to the parents telling them how lousy we are, with suggestions as to which nearby schools they should send their children. That'll hurt. And in the meantime, we'll have to do something about our math and reading scores, which are apparently the only things that really matter.

The fact that my school didn't make AYP wasn't much of a surprise, actually. We barely scraped by last year, and since then the state raised the bar considerably. Passing this year would have been an incredible feat.

But we failed, and I'm left to describe how I feel. A little disappointed, a little discouraged, but mostly frustrated. Frustrated by the fact that our low reading and math scores belie the many great things about my school, a school that for two years running has received a cash award from the state in recognition of our progress in reducing the achievement gap. But somehow, our test scores don't mention that. 

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