Hi. Welcome to a new year and a new day! This is going to be the one when you do all those great things you’ve always wanted to do, when you’ll prove everyone wrong, when all your teachers will help instead of hinder you, when you’ll become an interesting person by being interested in lots of things, when you’ll realize that you have more control over your experiences and emotions than you ever thought, when you’ll discover that even the “boring” things have value, when you’ll kick some serious academic gluteus maximus. Lots of other great things will happen in your personal life, too, as a result of all this. It’s all good. All of it.

Relax, though, because your teachers also know that things happen sometimes. We know that sometimes it really isn’t your fault and that the final grade isn’t always the best indication of your skill in that subject. That’s a bummer and this is an imperfect system we work within. We will try everything we can to make sure the grade shows your skill in our subject and nothing else. We’ll also try our best to give you multiple chances to show us your ability, learn the skills you need, and make up for things you missed in the past.

Partially to that address that, there are a number of tests scattered throughout the year. I know, I know. It feels like those tests are a waste of time since they don’t impact your grade. I get it. Really, I do. Your teachers do, too. Here’s the good news: you have a chance on those tests to prove just how talented you are, even if you’re falling down in the course itself. Step it up on all those bubble tests, put in your full effort, and you just might be moved on to the next level of English even if your grades hint that might not be the best thing. It’s your chance to show that your low grade is not your skill, but something else. If you shrug off all those tests, you’re sending the message that you don’t have what it takes and we both know that’s the wrong message to send. We want the final grade to be an indication, not the indication of your skills. You are more than just one mark and it’s your level of skill that is ultimately important.

One more thing: it is never too early, but it is sometimes too late. Please start to look right now at your graduation requirements and everything you’re doing toward that goal. Consider summer and night school. You don’t want to be in your senior year without any idea of what you need to do in order to walk the stage in June. It’s not too high a bar, but you might need to start thinking about some of these things now in order to jump that bar in a few years. Your teachers are here to help you and we have full faith that we can. You can do this.

All your teachers already believe all this. We’re so glad that you finally do, too. Now let’s begin.

Signed,
Your School

Dear Teachers:

What if you believed the above about every single one of your students for 180 days of the school year, regardless of how they presented themselves? Is there any information you can give your students that will help them realize that they, in fact, can do this? What if you thought today is the day that student will finally start to put things together? How would that change the way you interact with your students, sequence your lessons, and create assignments? How can you make it so that none of your students end up waiting too long to take care of business, that even a student in the last minute can show the skills needed to pass your class?

And what if all of your colleagues believed the same? How would that change your school climate? How would that change manifest itself? How would that impact your school’s physical campus, staff development meetings, disciplinary action, and activities?

How does my letter to students need to be edited? Did I miss the mark on a few things?Similar Posts:

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Think this will have an affect on graduation rates? Will this curtail admission to universities? How do you think this is going to impact any standardized tests your state gives? My state gives the STAR and HSEE. My district gives the DRP and its own semester benchmark exam. Of course, there’s always AP and/or IB tests. I think those are going to matter a whole lot less than they already did. Are we still serious about using those test scores as a measure of how well teachers, schools, districts, and states are doing? There are a lot of reasons for low performance. Lack of skill due to poor instruction is only one possibility. What about the multitude of others?

We need to consider the bigger picture of who students are and what instruction is. It is not a single set of grades, test scores, or standards. It’s not a single day’s worth of instruction and it isn’t only what happens from 8 to 3 Monday through Friday. The system is a human one, so are we honest when we try to distill success or failure to a single mark on the page — an API score, an AYP measure, or the ranking in a Newsweek article?

This has been bugging me for a long time. Reading another paragraph from a 15 year old discussing the stress of losing a home, listening to an 18 year old talk about how her job is the only job held in her household, and finding yet another student gone from my class because the family is moving to Texas threw me over the edge this week. When you don’t know if there’ll be a roof over your head when you get home, how can anything done in school be important? This is not a matter of teacher quality. This goes far beyond that.Similar Posts:

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AYPAPIAPRPI

Yeah, that’s tough to decypher. Who can keep track of all these TLAs? For the uninitiated, just know that these are all measurements of a school’s performance on state standards tests, exit exams, participation percentages in both, and graduation rates.

The two subgroups who fell short of the mandated API growth (state standards tests and exit exam results) are Students with Disabilities (SpEd), who dropped by twenty points, and English Learners (EL), who dropped by seven points.

Illegit Testing

There are gigantic flaws in the way those two specific groups are assessed, so it’s really no surprise that those groups didn’t meet the goals. In the case of these two groups, the lack of preparation for the tests is the direct result of their disability or language acquisition, a product of the only proper way to place a student: SpEd and EL students are in classes that do not necessarily teach the standards for their grade level for completely legitimate reasons. IEPs, other accommodations, and the level of ELD course enrolled in sometimes make this the case. They are handed test booklets based on their year in school, not their current class schedule.

But what does any of this tell us about our instruction? What did we do that caused the increase? What did we do that caused the decrease? Can the variables be excluded enough to even begin to answer these questions? Because isn’t that what these scores are supposed to do for schools, help them then go on to raise performance? Is your school talking about these scores in the context of what it means for classroom instruction?Similar Posts:

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I can’t even get 29 students in my classroom to agree on whether or not my shirt matches my tie.

As In… Magnum?

We’re in PI status because of not making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), a number determined by a formula generated by the federal government. AYP can be seen as a school’s report card… sort of. It’s made up of student performance (on CAHSEE and STAR), graduation rates, and participation percentages.

Just getting a kid in the seat to bubble in a few circles counts toward our AYP.

On the contrary, a student cutting school on the day of testing or in jail unable to attend school or who has relocated but is still on our records or whose parent has exempted him/her from taking the STAR hurts our AYP.

No joke.

Same Pay, More Kids

Because we are now a PI district (and because my district has decided to treat all campuses as PI schools), schools must provide support classes for strategic (2-3 years below grade level) and intensive (4 or more years below grade level) students. Those are more classes that need a teacher.

As such, Morgan-Hart funding is out the window for mainstream students. Instead of hiring more teachers, the current number of teachers will instruct more students per period and also take on the support classes. All English 1 and freshman math classes will now be stacked at 30:1 (32:1 for those math classes). They have been loaded at 20:1 for the last decade or more.

Raising the ratio equals more students in a teacher’s class, lowering the number of sections needed. With fewer sections of freshman English and math, teachers are available to teach other courses, namely those support classes.

Those sections of English and math that are associated with a support class will continue to enjoy the 20:1 perk. But if you’re a core kid (no more than 1 year below grade level), you’re thrown in with 10 more students than your previous year compatriots ever lived with.

Who Is Going To Fight?

The sad thing is that all of this is very complicated; the majority of our parents have no idea why this is happening and no one from the district office is going to explain it to them. You, faithful reader, probably don’t even entirely understand it. I’m sitting waist deep in the repercussions of all this and I’m not entirely certain I’ve explained it accurately. API? AYP? APR? Base vs. growth?

Is this convoluted mess the best system of “accountability” we can muster?Similar Posts:

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The English CSTs count for a large percentage in the measure of a school meeting yearly goals, somewhere near 30% of a school’s Annual Performance Indicator (API) score (good luck “Understanding the API”, a calculation that has changed each year it’s been in effect). I wrote about this last year, but felt this deserves its own post in order to call this trouble to your attention:

1. Plenty of students take the test without exposure to the standards assessed.

What!?

This is not a question of teachers not teaching the standards. This is about students who repeat a course, are English Learner (EL) students, or are special education students. Look around your school. A lot of students likely fall into at least one of those three populations.

Any student who is a junior will receive the Grade 11 CST booklet during the STAR test. The CST booklet is handed out according to the grade level of the student, not the English class that student is enrolled in. That’s a huge problem.

English standards are broken into two sets: one set of 62 standards for grades 9/10 and another set of 54 standards for grades 11/12. The CSTs for grades 9 and 10 do not assess different standards, so freshmen are expected to be exposed to all 62 of those standards by April of their first year in high school. Just a statement of fact, you make your own judgment about that.

Any junior sitting in English 2 has not been exposed to the 11/12 standards. Any junior EL student sitting in Language Arts 2 has not been exposed to the 11/12 standards. Any junior special education student sitting in English 3 may not have been exposed to the 11/12 standards, depending on what his IEP says.

Yet all three of those students will be handed the (often) pink Grade 11 booklet in April and expected to make sense out of material they have never been directly taught. Even though that deficiency is for completely legitimate reasons, schools will be held “accountable” for those students not scoring at proficient or above.

This is a problem with a one-size-fits-all solution like NCLB and the way it’s been implemented (and by all accounts will be implemented into the future). This is one direct response to what Dan and Eric have written. I have lots of reasons to dislike NCLB, but this is one reason very specific to English courses.Similar Posts:

• AYP, API, And Horse Pucky
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