Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Most people associate New Year’s resolutions with the week after Christmas, but every Labor Day students, parents, and teachers make hopeful plans and promises for the new school year.
Hope is an appropriate emotion in September. Children really do change from one school year to the next. One thing that doesn’t change, though, is the annual surplus of back-to-school suggestions, from hysterical ravings that detail “Ten Ways to Tell If Your Child’s Teacher Is an Alien” to the customary, innocuous counsel to “keep the lines of communication open between home and school.” Recognizing that he may only be adding to the glut, here’s Poor Elijah’s short list of September observations.
1. Home-school communication isn’t bad. It’s just overrated. Parents should always feel free to contact their child’s teacher, but the most important communication about school happens between parents and their child, not between parents and their child’s teacher. In a world where it’s commonplace to see families sitting at restaurant tables while each member, young and old, is playing his own handheld game or texting someone who isn’t at the table, the last thing we need is for parents to find out about school through a website instead of through their child. Yet that’s precisely the direction in which schools are headed – bigger and better school websites conveying more and more extraneous information.
Strangers who visit your Facebook page aren’t really your “friends,” and constantly checking your school’s website isn’t communication. If you want to know how school went today or how your child did on his test, ask him. If he can’t or won’t tell you, that’s the communication problem you need to address.
2. Speaking of communication, reformers are once more replacing A through F grades with “standards-based” grading formats, this time tied to the Common Core, in which numbers, typically from four to one, replace letter grades. Advocates tout their newly recycled numerical scale and the multiple assessment domains in which the numbers are awarded as more objective, informative and parent-friendly.
The immeasurably more complicated system typically requires that teachers distinguish between student work that “exceeds expectations,” “meets expectations,” is “making progress toward expectations,” or “does not meet expectations.” While someone who’s “making progress” toward expectations by definition also “does not meet” those expectations, designating the lowest category “isn’t making progress” apparently sounded too negative.
What once would have been your child’s grade in English will now appear, for example, as 10 separate ratings in categories like “range of writing.” I’m willing to bet the most common parental response to the new parent-friendly report cards will be, “That’s nice, but what’s my kid’s grade?”
Further complicating matters, according to some advocates, students can score 100 percent on a test, but still earn only a “3” if nothing on the test “extends” above grade level. Others maintain that students can’t receive higher than a “2” early in the year because no matter how well they’re doing, they won’t yet be fully “proficient” in their grade level’s skills. Of course, in an education world where experts blithely mandate that every student will succeed, four-point standards-based scales, by eliminating F’s, eliminate the possibility that any student will fail.
In many districts where standards-based grading has been imposed, parents have been so disenchanted that school officials are already re-translating their standards-based numbers into A’s and F’s. Hopefully it won’t take long to get this recycled fiasco out of our system again.
3. Several specific reform trends are making things worse. Officials are demanding “safe schools” even as they strip teachers of the power to enforce discipline that would make them safe. You can’t regard “disruption,” “defiance,” and “fighting” as “minor infractions” and expect safety or learning.
You can’t effectively run a school unless you work in one. Every principal’s duties should include teaching one class every day, all year, every year.
School districts are opting or being compelled to consolidate, usually in the name of saving money, something consolidation rarely accomplishes. When consolidation results in an explosion in the number of central office personnel and a doubling of office space, it’s unlikely you’ll be saving any money.
Instead of paying teachers to work with remedial students, federal grant regulations increasingly require schools to hire “academic coaches,” many of whom have limited experience or success as classroom teachers. When they’re not attending meetings, these coaches teach classroom teachers how to teach the remedial students who used to get actual extra help.
4. As officials attempt to hold schools accountable for poor student performance and other problems that sometimes are and often aren’t schools’ fault, teachers are increasingly subject to new, elaborate “supervision and evaluation models.” These rating systems usually involve an inordinate amount of pointless paperwork for both teachers and principals, and rely significantly on students’ standardized test scores to determine how well I’m doing my job.
How well my students do this year rests substantially on what they learned last year when I wasn’t their teacher. In addition, contemporary standardized assessments have proven embarrassingly unreliable.
The best way to judge a school is to look at how well its students do when they graduate to the next school.
If my doctor prescribes the wrong medicine, that’s his fault. If, on the other hand, it’s the right medicine, but I refuse to take it, that’s my fault. It works the same way for my students and me. Don’t hold teachers responsible for what their students don’t or won’t do, or for the limits of their students’ abilities. I also can’t remediate all the disadvantages and hardships that some of my students face at home.
5. Many of the “initiatives” and other problems plaguing students, parents and teachers originate in the fertile minds of the experts and officials who run public education. Most have never taught, fled the classroom after a few introductory semesters, or taught so long ago that they’ve either never known classroom reality or lost touch with it.
You can’t effectively run a school unless you work in one. Every principal’s duties should include teaching one class every day, all year, every year. Every superintendent, assistant superintendent, curriculum coordinator, special education director, and anyone else with an office desk should be required to work as a teacher full time in a classroom every seven years. Consider it a sabbatical into the real world.
That’s where students and teachers work.
That’s what makes it real.
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