The Test and Educational Ridiculousness

I'm posting this video today in honor of the failed dress rehearsal that happened in my school today during 4th period. By dress rehearsal, I mean a twenty minute interval during 4th period in which every seventh grader in the school signed onto our PARCC Navigation system at the same time to see if our internet could handle over 200 students all connecting at once.  It worked for about a third of the students, but most could not connect.  The only thing that my students learned in my class today is that this test is going to create a lot of chaos.    

We are two weeks away from the real PARCC assessment and it is taking away instructional time for students and collaboration time for teachers.  Administrators instruct us in all things Test, but it is obvious that even they don't like it.  What Joshua Katz in his TED Talk "The Toxic Culture of Education" describes is absolutely true.  Our school is focusing on a standardized test that is setting our students up for failure.  PARCC is creating a toxic culture within our walls and it is a force far beyond the control of everyone.  The Test is unfair and a waste of time.  My school in particular might not even have the resources to allow every student to take this test at the same time.  Teachers expect nothing less than a chaotic week of technical difficulties and stress permeating throughout the building.

Let's take deep breaths together.  None of this will matter in a year or two.  We'll be onto the next best thing in educational ridiculousness.    

The Evanston Mindset

A few years ago, when my alma mater Evanston Township High School decided to reconsider it’s curriculum tracking in a whole new way, a neighbor that was very familiar with local school politics and policy told me, “If this works, Dr. Witherspoon and Evanston are going to be nationally known.”  That prediction is baring fruit as the only public high school in Evanston, the first suburb north of Chicago is the subject of a feature article in the National Journal, a magazine that reports on politics and cultural trends around the country.  The story explored Evanston Township’s push to expand Advanced Placement(AP) programs to as many students as possible specifically the embarrassingly underrepresented minority populations.  The Journal cited the most recent numbers from 2014 in which over 88 percent of white students at Evanston graduated after taking at least one AP class while that same number is 44 percent for African-American students.  Such a gap is still way too far for any school that is serious about equality, but there is a change underway at Evanston that seems to be setting the school up for long term success. 

What impresses me most about Evanston Township is its change in mindset led by the school district’s superintendent, Dr. Eric Witherspoon.  His attitude that “you aren’t born smart.  You get smarter,” is spreading throughout every corner of the school.  It’s an attitude that is closely associated with the work of Dr. Carol Dweck and her Growth Mindset.  Dweck’s Growth Mindset embraces the scientifically supported notion that every person possess within them the ability to improve every aspect of who they are including their intelligence, personality, and all other skills.  Evanston even brought Dr. Dweck to come and speak with the staff as part of it’s extensive professional development.  The renown developmental psychologist does not claim that everyone is equal or that every person has the ability to reach the same intellectual plateau, but  growth is innate within everyone.  Her work shows that it is more valuable to praise effort to make you intelligent then the intelligence itself.  From a teacher’s perspective, nothing could be more important for fostering young people into life long learners.     

This mindset is more significant than the AP push itself.  It touches on every aspect of the school’s culture and everyday life.  If you have a message like that coming leaders at top, buy in is much greater for the staff and community alike.  It challenges the notion that we should determine, as Evanston did while I was in school, what a child is capable of when they are at the elementary or middle level of secondary education.  Growth happens at different rates and in different ways for everyone, and school should be a place that is ready to support students whenever and wherever it takes place.  Students should be allowed every opportunity to achieve the highest level of course work possible, which means that schools should not make such life altering decisions about curriculum tracking at such a young age with no opportunity for change in the future.      

One effort by school officials to increase the number of students taking AP classes is the elimination of honors and standard freshmen English classes and the creation of a mixed-honors class for all freshmen.  By mandating that all students participate in the same English classes in which honors credit is available and must be earned in their first year, Evanston acknowledges the fact that schools need to give students opportunity as well as flexibility.  Within the old system, if a student was placed into a regular class as a freshmen, the likelihood of moving up to honors or AP level classes was painfully low.  Witherspoon understands that it is the culture as well as the structure of the school, not the students, that need to be changed the most.

As an outsider without much access to Evanston Township, I wonder how this mindset has impacted non-honors or AP classes within the school.  Even with this movement to expand AP programs and opportunities, there are still many students taking courses of lower rigor.  What are the cultures within those classes?  Are they being pushed towards higher level work?  Are students given the opportunity to move to higher level classes if they choose to put in the effort to do so? What are the expectations of teachers for students in those classes?  What are the expectations of the students for themselves?  

As a 7th grade writing teacher, I do not teach any honors or standard writing classes.  All of my classes are “mixed” in the sense that I teach students within the same class that take honors reading and math along with those that do not take any honors classes.  When asked about the label of my classes, I tell students that “All of my classes are honors level classes.”  This is the attitude in which I approach my preparation and this is a big part of the expectations that I communicate with students. 

Each day, a wide range of abilities come through my classroom.  Sometimes, a lot of the times, it is overwhelming for me.  How can I push students to improve who both are struggling to understand a certain concept and at the same time are five steps ahead?  What do you do if one of your students has independently finished a writing project and another student hasn’t written a word and won’t be able to without some serious one on one attention?  These are the types of situations that scare teachers as well as community members into thinking that the quality of the classroom experience decreases with such a wide range of skills.  

I don’t claim to have all of the answers.  I’m still in search of practical ways to reach all students.  I do know that it takes a detailed focus on understanding what your students already know and what they need to know in order to take their skills to the next level wherever that might be.  It takes organization, planning and vision.  It takes collaboration with a focus on student work.  It takes a classroom environment that allows students to all be working on different things or different ideas at the same time.  Most important, it takes a core belief that students are not born smart; rather they grow smarter.  

This is what Evanston Township is trying to do.  I expect that it will continue to draw support as well as criticisms from a wide range of stakeholders.  For me, Evanston is exactly the type of school that I want to work for.  If a school doesn’t believe that change is possible and that all students can learn, what do they believe?  Moving forward, I hope that Evanston will empirically prove that this approach works for all students.  In order to get buy in, they’ll have to show that it helps both students that are taking AP classes that never would have taken such courses as well as students that would have taken them regardless.  They will need to show that they have raised expectations for all students and not just those students on the margins.  They will need to show that the graduation rate increases, the number of students that receive AP credit by passing tests increases, and the number of students that do well on standardized tests such as the ACT increases.  

Good luck Evanston.  You’re in for a wild ride.  Maybe, I’ll join the excitement some day

Tyrannical Substitutes...Not Such a Bad Idea

Advice to teachers: one way to remind your students that you really are a great teacher and not the most horrible person in the world is to take day off.  When you schedule your replacement, make sure the worst possible substitute teacher presides over your classroom.  After only one day of a tyrannical, oppressive adult leading the classroom, they will surely be counting the minutes until you return to the classroom.  They will greet you upon your return with smiling faces and thanks to the heavens that you have returned.  You will be their savior because the only thing worse than a teacher they can’t stand is an incompetent substitute.  It will feel great especially if you teach multiple classes and you get multiple cheers of excitement throughout the day.  Sometimes a little reminder that you are not the worst person in the world, that you actually care about their well being and that some of the things that you do actually are for their own benefit is all they need to reestablish their love for you.  And let me promise you, a little appreciation at school from time to time is all you need to keep your energy and positive attitude alive for days to come.  So if you really care about your classroom, create a little chaos on purpose and reap the benefits for for foreseeable future or at least until you have your next explosion. 

Thoughts on Hope

I was struck by a passage in a novel by Dave Eggers called What is the What.  The main character in the book Valentino Achak Deng, a “Lost Boy” living in refuge in the United States after experiencing unthinkable hardship during the Sudanese Civil War, is telling of losing an important person in his life on his way from war plagued south Sudan to Ethiopia.  Recalling his pain after losing the one person that supported him the most, Deng(What is the What is a fictional autobiography based very closely on the life of Deng) says:

I was so tired at that moment, so bone tired that I felt that I could fall asleep as he did, sleep until my body went cold.  But then I thought of my mother and my father, my brothers and sisters, and found myself invoking [his] own mythic visions of Ethiopia.  The world was terrible but perhaps I would see them again.  It was enough to bring me to my feet again.  I stood and chose to continue walking, to walk until I could not walk(Eggers 218).  

As soon as these words crossed my eyes, I thought of another book I’d read about how man experiences the worst of human evil called Man’s Search for Meaning.  In his psychological portrait of an average prisoner of war, Dr. Viktor E. Frankl describes what happens as a result of the loss of hope when enduring struggle and suffering: 

The death rate in the week between Christmas, 1944, and New Year’s, 1945, increased in camp beyond all previous experience. In his opinion, the explanation for this increase did not lie in the harder working conditions or the deterioration of our food supplies or a change of wealth or new epidemics. It was simply that the majority of the prisoners had lived in the naive hope that they would be home again by Christmas. As the time drew near and there was no encouraging news, the prisoners lost courage and disappointment overcame them. This had a dangerous influence on their powers of resistance and a great number of them died(Frankl 76).

These two books, describing different versions of the same story of the human potential for both absolute evil and goodness, capture the crucial nature hope plays when overcoming all manner of adversity.  For they show that hope, though not some sort of magical shield, is an essential ingredients for moving forward in life.  Both groups, the people of Sudan during the later part of the 20th century and those that endured Holocaust, lived through pure evil.  However, Eggers and Dr. Frankl show that those that are willing to keep moving forward with life have a greater chance to fight off all of the forces that stack against them.

My life has known no evil or suffering of the magnitude that these writers describe.  Yet, I am growing more aware of the magnitude of human failures such as injustice, inequality, racism, greed, disease, war and hatred plentiful on every corner of the Earth.  Even my own life, though comfortable by any reasonable measure, is full of challenges and obstacles every step of the way.  So it is with hope that I choose to face each misfortunate or difficulty.  Hope that life will improve, problems will be solved and that people will be good to each other.

I feel compelled to end this post with one more quote from Dr. Frankl that has become a credence in my own life; reminding me on a daily basis that I have the power to choose hope and goodness:  

We who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way(Frankl 65-66).