Those Sub Par Kids

I was on the phone with my father the other day and somehow the conversation turned to No Child Left Behind. That happens sometimes, when one of the people in the conversation is a teacher, and a radical one at that. My father at some point said what I’ve heard so many times before from people around me. “I don’t understand what the problem is—what’s wrong with holding teachers accountable for what their students learn?”

Nothing. Really, nothing is wrong with it. I believe that people not directly involved in education think the way my father does—accountability is good, why are schools and teachers fighting against No Child Left Behind if not because they are sub par and just don’t want anyone to know it? When President Bush utters the phrase “the bigotry of soft expectations” I secretly believe he thinks the same thing.

I could, of course be wrong, but I don’t think it’s naïve to say that most people really don’t know what goes on in “failing” schools. I wrote an article about what it’s like to teach in one of these schools a few months ago, and one reader responded that perhaps if schools are labeled as failing, , it’s because the kids and the schools are “sub par.” I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck when I read that. It was everything I could do not to write an immediate response that probably wouldn’t have had the professional tone I think is necessary. So instead, I let others respond in posts, and this is my response, an attempt to help people understand why a one-size-fits-all test is not an appropriate or accurate measure of what a child knows or whether a school is “failing” or rather, is simply struggling to meet the needs of a diverse and struggling population.

This year I teach at a charter school. I made the decision to move out of the public school system because I wanted to be somewhere where test scores were not the only thing that mattered, where teachers still had the ability to make decisions based on how their students performed instead of adhering to arbitrary guides designed to push through curriculum. Upon going to work my first week of school, I discovered my school was officially in program improvement; we were now labeled a “failing” school.

I was a little disillusioned when I discovered that I was being pushed right back to that place from which I had just escaped—that label of failing and all of the punitive measures that come with it. Even more disturbing was the moment that came at the end of my first day of school, when I was reading through the writing I had assigned to my students. These students were far more advanced in their writing skills, in their grammar and especially in the content of their ideas. Yet if I compared test scores between the two schools where I had taught, this year’s students faired far worse. In my mind, that’s a sure sign there is a problem with the test.

An even bigger problem is assuming all students in all areas of this country have the same opportunity to do well on this test. I’m not in the business of making excuses for my students, either here or in my own classroom But when all is said and done, the only people I can or should compare my students to are themselves, not to the kids down the street or in the next city over.

The reason this type of comparison is so dangerous is obvious to me when I look at the lives of my students. They come from difficult backgrounds and often live in neighborhoods where I wouldn’t want to find myself at night.

Needless to say, a lot of these kids have tough, tough lives. They tell me stories and I have to act like the things they say are no big deal, because I don’t want to freak out these children any more than they already are; but it is a big deal. Let’s take JT for an example. I met JT my first year of teaching and too much time with JT might very well have caused it to be my last. I knew JT from the beginning of the school year. I taught him reading one trimester even though he wasn’t in my fifth grade class. I didn’t have JT at all the second trimester, although he would sometimes be sent to me for detention. Third trimester he was moved into my room because he threatened to slit his teacher’s tires. I guess at least it wasn’t her throat.

Here’s JT’s story. When he was in kindergarten, his father was shot by a drug dealer. Apparently, his dad was high on drugs, but had somehow managed to cheat the drug dealer out of some money. This is a story that would be repeated over and over to JT by his aunt whenever he got in trouble. Remember what happened to your father when he did things like that?

A few months later, 5 year old JT came home from school one day to find his mother hanging in the living room. She had decided to kill herself to deal with her grief over the loss of her husband and the children she had to raise on her own. I can’t imagine what that would do the mind of a 5 year old, to lose the most important people in the world to him one right after another and in such graphic ways. Actually, I can, because I got to see it first-hand.

If you’re like me, when you read this story, you felt bad for JT. You felt that that was an experience no child should have to go through. And you might even feel that we should do everything in our power to help this child. Then you meet JT and you realize we could all do everything in our power and nothing would ever be enough. I don’t know the technical name for the condition that this causes in a child, but I know that by the time JT got to me he had been labeled learning disabled. I know that he threatened to slit his teacher’s tires. I know that he sexually harassed several students in my homeroom class and indicated on more than a few times that he was in a gang (whether that was just posturing or not, I don’t know.) I know that he never did his homework and seemed to enjoy the time that I would punish him by pulling him out of other activities to work on whatever he had missed. I know that during standardized testing he put his head down on the desk and flat-out refused to take the test. His counselor once described him to me as an endless pit of need—no amount of time helping, cajoling, or pouring our energy into would be enough.

Despite my frustrations with him, I grew very fond of JT. He exhausted me and took way more of my time than was fair to the other 30 kids in my room that year. I was a first year teacher and still believed that all kids could be “saved”, and that it was my job to save them. I was heartbroken when JT came back to visit me for a few minutes two years after he left our school. He couldn’t look me in the eye during our conversation but told me was getting all A’s (I knew differently) and that he missed my classroom. It was also clear that all of the things that I had feared for JT had come true.

I’m not saying that all of my students are like this or have these kinds of needs. But enough are that it needs to be said. Students come with baggage—they aren’t blank slates when they walk into a classroom, no matter how much you might like them to be. During the time I’ve been teaching, I have reported child abuse for two of my kids, I’ve dealt with a group of six kids already in a gang at the age of 10, a student who threatened to kill his mother, another that was already a chronic thief and left my room on a felony charge. I have students in foster care and students who are homeless. I’ve had numerous families move their children out of school because they couldn’t afford the rent anymore. Every year, at least a third of my students speak a language other than English at home. This year, it’s half.

Do we really think these things don’t make a difference in how kids learn? Ignoring all of the traumatic issues, let’s just focus on English language learners. Can you imagine what it would be like to spend your time in a classroom where the teacher was teaching you difficult concepts in Science and Social Studies and Math—and you needed to understand all of those concepts in a language other than your own? At least one of my students every year has been in the country less than a year. Whatever you might think of immigration policies in this country, I think most of us can agree that we are asking a lot of these students to take and pass a test in a second language. Do I expect that they will fare as well as students who have been speaking English all of their lives? No. Is that “the bigotry of soft-expectations”? Uh, no. That’s reality. We have a different set of standards for English language learners—why isn’t there a different standardized test for them to take?

If you want to know why I’m opposed to No Child Left Behind, well there it is. My kids do not come to me with the same skills as those who come from suburban neighborhoods, and they should not be compared to those children., but to themselves. If a fifth grade child comes to me reading at a second grade level and we work hard to get that child to the fourth grade reading level, I think that’s amazing and that child just made tremendous progress. On a standardized test, that’s called failing.

The Solution? Easy: get rid of No Child Left Behind. I don’t think that the majority of Americans understand what this legislation entails. This link provides a pretty succinct summary of the major provisions of No Child Left Behind.

None of it sounds bad necessarily—making sure teachers are highly qualified, making sure students are learning something at their schools. The problems come in when we assume that all children are the same. I think I’ve demonstrated that they are not, and I don’t think that my classroom is that different from others in struggling, low-socioeconomic areas. Children are different and treating them as if they are all the same is dangerous and wildly unfair.

Accountability is a good idea. I have witnessed first-hand teachers that are not doing their jobs. And when teachers don’t do their jobs, they jeopardize students. Accountability shouldn’t mean putting unreasonable expectations on students, however. I think it’s time for the powers that be to rethink testing and find a way to make assessment about helping students