No Child Left Behind, my ass.

While I frankly don't think vouchers, charter schools, or merit pay are the answers to all our problems (and I don't really know what the answers are, either), I do recognize that we leave kids behind all the time.

I have kids in my 11th grade English class who can barely write a coherent paragraph. And if all goes as expected, they will graduate from high school and probably go to college, where the teachers will rant about how they're in need of remediation. I know, dude. They were in need when I got them, and I tried to give it to them. As high school teachers, our natural instinct is to blame the junior high teachers. And when I was a junior high teacher, we blamed the elementary schools. It just goes right on down until you get to some poor, sweet, beleaguered kindergarten teacher yelling "What the hell am I supposed to do? The kid has never seen a book before he got here, he's absent once a week, tardy two out of three days, and his parents took him out of the country for a month in January!"

We can't blame the parents. I mean that and I don't. Obviously, you'd have to be a fucking idiot not to realize that kids who come from homes with educated parents and books and shit do better in school. But what good does it do for us to blame the parents who don't have that stuff? It's still our job to educate their children. That's what all this "closing the achievement gap" business is all about.

But there are places where we could be doing a better job. At risk of being Dooced, here's a (completely anonymous) story from last week.

We haven't done a lot of long-form writing yet. Mostly one or two sentences or maybe a paragraph. This young lady (we'll call her Faye) has turned in some stuff of varying quality. Sometimes it's quite good, and other times it's riddled with errors. But it's so hard to tell what's going on in a few sentences. We did a longer piece of writing the other day. I read her first draft. It was SCARY bad. Like, the first four sentences were riddled with errors to the point that it was incomprehensible. Then the next four sentences were fluent and brilliant -- and completely plagiarized from the text we had read. The next day they were typing this same piece of writing. Faye had taken her rough draft home and left it, so I told her to just start again. I looked over her shoulder and saw some really odd sentences. Stuff that was totally fluent, but missing a word. I glanced at the girl's computer who was sitting next to her and it all made sense; Faye was copying, but her English skills weren't even good enough to understand that she wasn't copying accurately.

Long story short, I called the counselor and we met with another gal and went over Faye's cumulative file together. Although she has been in this school system in English-speaking classes for TEN years, she was only at an "early intermediate" level as an English speaker. That's one step above beginning and a far cry from where you'd expect she would be. Her teachers had met with parents on three separate occasions for a formal meeting to see how they could help her out because she was struggling, but had never considered testing her for special ed. In junior high, even though she was at early intermediate and was a fluent English speaker, they put her in classes designed for beginning English speakers.

How does a kid like that fall through the cracks? Is it because she's a language-learner that they assumed she was doing the best she could? How could her English skills not improve over ten years? How do we expect her to pass the exit exam? How are we preparing her for work or college?

Almost all my freshmen are at the below basic or far below basic level according to test scores. That means they read and write at a level several years below high school level. My goal is to move them two years in one year, but even so, that puts some of them at a 6th grade level in the 10th grade. There are five special ed kids in that class and three or four more who probably ought to be. A lot of kids need individual attention in order to even pick up a pencil. So yes, our school system isn't working as well as it could. I think we're doing our best at my school. I'm trying personally to do my best. But somewhere along the line, something isn't working.

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Hey, you know, all that said, I've had some really good work-related moments lately. I've found myself collaborating with the English department to improve that curriculum I don't love. We've really used our time wisely, worked together, and strengthened the writing part of the program a lot. I had an interesting discussion with my fellow IB teachers today about the exams and the program in general and what we can work on. We talked at length about grading and the reasons for giving grades in a meeting a couple weeks ago, and I heard some perspectives that were enlightening. We did some interesting stuff in my small learning community related to different ways to improve kids' retention, one of which also prompted a stimulating discussion amongst teachers. I went to a training where I got some valuable ideas, including something I'll use this spring with my 11th graders for sure. I'm trying to set the bar higher for my 9th graders. Last year I had a bunch of really rough kids, so if I could get them to work at all, sometimes it was such a struggle that even if they'd done it wrong, I'd be happy that they had just done it. None of that this year -- today I made a kid do something over 4 times (I asked nicely and gave encouragement and suggestions) because it wasn't right and it was clear he didn't understand. Anyway, I'm feeling pretty good about my job this year. Only took ten years, huh? Twenty more to go, and then I'm blowing this popsicle stand!