Too many top priorities

I haven’t posted in a while.  I had a much-needed three week winter break during which I got much less done than I intended (so what else is new?). Now school has been back in session almost two weeks, during which time my journey has been very bumpy.  Just when I think I’ve made some progress rolling the boulder up the hill, it slips away from me and rolls back down the hill, knocking me over on the way down.  Where do I stand as I face the end of the first semester?

For one thing, I am getting to know these boys better and better, and the more I know them the more I like them.  They are mostly very likable and good-natured.  I enjoy chatting with them before class as they line up in the hallway and after school when I encounter them around the campus.  This sometimes makes it more enjoyable to teach them, but at other times when I face them as a class they resist all of my efforts to guide their behavior.  I have had more than a few very frustrating moments already in the new year.  I continue to feel constrained in what I can plan because of the difficulty in getting them to cooperate as a class.  

For another thing, it is truly awesome what the policy makers in the state government and the district administration expect me and all teachers to do.  Here’s a little list:

1. District concept-lessons for the four writing units (narrative, expository, response to literature, persuasive).  As I’ve said, they’re good lessons, very student-centered and constructivist, but they are very involved and often need to be simplified and abbreviated.  Each unit culminates in a major writing project.  For example, in the expository unit they must write a 500 word news story about an event in their neighborhood   It is a state and local priority for students to write more and better, of course, a priority that I share.
2. This is good since students should write a much as possible, and it also lends itself to the use of the online writing program I have described, MyAccess.  That has its own requirements for implementation, valuable as it is, and takes time to organize, but it is a priority that they write a lot.
3. We also want them to read more, especially on their own, so we have the program called “Accelerated Reader” in which students read a book at their level and then go online to take a brief quiz about the book.  I have now assigned them to read and pass quizzes on four books before the end of the semester.  This is now serving as homework, but it’s a lot of work to convince them that they really have to get a book from the library, read it, and pass the quiz on it.  Again, it’s worthwhile but has to be a priority of mine if it is to be successful.
4. Then on top of all this, we have the California Standards Test coming up in May and the District’s Periodic Assessments in February and April.  It is of course (you guessed it!) a priority for the state and district to prepare students for these tests.  I have received voluminous materials on paper and online to prepare them for these tests.  As I said in the kudzu post, I could spend all of my time on this priority alone.

So there you have it.  Four top priorities to be implemented with all of the attendant adaptation and organization they require.  I can’t argue with any of them, but together they present an almost insuperable challenge.   Each must be implemented on its own and then integrated with the others.  No wonder my head spins when I try to juggle them all in the pedagogical air!

And so I stride towards the end of a semester, the mid-point in the year, head bloodied but unbowed.  More soon.

Standardized Testing is the KUDZU of public education, part 2.

In the past decade standardized testing has come to dominate public education.  Schools are ranked and evaluated based on test scores.  Federal and state dollars are allocated based on test scores. Principals are fired and hired based on test scores.  Now teachers may be evaluated based on student test scores.  How did we get into this situation?

This trend to place more and more importance on test scores has been a political and not an educational decision.   Significantly, it has been a bipartisan political decision.  Democrats (Davis, Obama, Villaraigosa) and Republicans (Swarzenegger, Bush, Riordan) together with billionaire “reformers” (Broad, Gates) have relentlessly promoted standardized tests as the lingua franca of educational achievement.  The only voices of dissent have been the teachers themselves and their unions, and this dissent has strained the traditional bonds between teacher unions and Democrats.

I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that as test scores have been adopted as the primary measure of student learning, the level of funding for public schools has stagnated and even declined. At the same time all other aspects of children’s lives have deteriorated dramatically.  Health care, housing, nutrition--American children are worse off in all these areas as more and more have slipped into poverty. 

But rather than focus on children’s lives as the cause of problems in education, the bipartisan consensus is emerging that the cause of low test scores is not poverty--hunger, homelessness, ill health--and not inadequate  funding--large class sizes, no support staff, deteriorating facilities.  Instead the primary cause of educational failure is....TEACHERS!   Yes, if teachers will just cooperate by placing the proper emphasis on test scores, then it won’t matter if the children are ill-fed, ill-housed, and in ill-health; it won't matter if classes are large, support negligible, and buildings decrepit. 

But not all teachers are the problem.  According the the prevailing “reform” meme coming from Republicans, many Democrats, and the billionaires, the problem is veteran teachers, i.e., the highest paid teachers who have enough job security, thanks to union strength, to resist the headlong rush to enshrine standardized testing as the ultimate arbiter of educational quality.  Disgracefully, this message has come from political leaders who have never hesitated to take campaign contributions from teachers but who now find it easier to blame high-priced veteran teachers for problems in the schools rather than take on the true cause, poverty.

So let’s sum up.  We have had three decades of Reaganism in which wealth has been steadily distributed up to the corporate elite and away from the middle class.  During this time more and more children have slipped into poverty, and funding for public education (especially in California) has declined or stagnated.  Parallel to these developments we have seen the rise of standardized tests that are cheaper to administer and cheaper to teach than more holistic, authentic measures of student achievement.  Anyone see a pattern here?

In Part 3:  What happened to the progressives?