I woke up in the middle of the night, and knew something was
wrong. I was cold, hot, shaking, queasy, everything ached. I stumbled into the
bathroom to find a thermometer and wait…

wait…

yup. A fever. Now it’s definitive. I’m sick.

Like somehow I didn’t know that until after the little
number popped up on the thermometer.

Well, it’s probably just a little virus, or something I ate.
Uncomfortable, unpleasant, but not serious I consoled myself as I curled up on
the floor by the toilet where I would be spending the next few hours.

A temperature tells us our immune system is working. It’s
fighting off the weakness in the body and in a day or two, we will be well
again. Most fevers don’t send us running off to the doctor. Unless they persist…

A fever tells us something is wrong. But by itself, it
doesn’t tell us what is wrong or how serious it might be. It takes a while to
figure out if you need to call in sick, or check into the hospital.  Just get some rest, or run expensive tests
using big humming medical equipment. These are the thoughts running through my
head at 2am on the floor of the bathroom.

What does any of this have to do with teaching? Well, since
I’m home sick today, I’m sitting here looking at my school’s MSP scores from
this past year. We, like many schools, seem to have a bit of a fever. Our
scores aren’t where we’d like them to be. They certainly aren’t terrible, but they’ve
declined two years in a row. I guess you would call that a fever in
reverse.  Anyway, it appears that we’re a
bit under the weather. However, the numbers that I’m looking at don’t tell the
whole story. It’s a small school. A few kids having a bad day are enough to
change our scores from one year to the next. Listen to the staff conversations about
this, and we all have an idea what caused the trouble. But what we don’t have
is expensive medical equipment that can give us a definitive diagnosis. All we
have is the number on the thermometer.

Do we need more professional development to help improve our
instruction?

Or new curriculum?

Or a new intervention program?

Or new technology?

Or stronger anti-poverty initiatives?

Or maybe a better thermometer?

Maybe the one we have is broken.

After all, in the past few years we’ve changed our test from
the WASL to the MSP, and then changed the administration of that test from
paper and pencil to computer based. It’s hard to compare year to year using an
inconsistent tool. Looking at National Assessment (NAEP)
scores from the past ten years, our 4^th grade state scores have
remained relatively unchanged.  It
doesn’t seem to matter what we do: which curriculum we adopt, which diagnostic
test we administer, which RtI model we embrace. The scores have not wavered in
the past decade.

According to the Flynn
Effect, we are getting more intelligent over time. If that’s true, then
seriously, why aren’t our test scores rising?

I’m not saying we can’t or shouldn’t do anything to try and
raise student achievement. On the contrary, I think we need to do even more…way
more…to figure out how to level the playing field, provide meaningful,
appropriate instruction, and assess it in ways that aren’t skewed by politics.
If after a decade this fever has persisted, it seems like it’s time to do more
than just keep taking our temperature over and over.