Tag: grades in high school

Not learning, that’s for sure.

When I started student teaching, I thought my purpose was to inspire students to love literature while helping them develop the basic analytical skills necessary for a life enriched, both literally and figuratively, by critical thought.

Within the first month of my contract, I realized how wrong I was. Most of my students (14 to 16-year-olds) wouldn’t read. Some couldn’t read. They definitely weren’t reading books at home.

In English, thinking follows reading, so you can see the problem here.

Of course, that was in a low-performing school where 95% of the students were at-risk, many of whom fell into multiple at-risk categories. What I’d been taught in teacher college was laughably impractical.

About two years into my career, I became friends with a colleague who remembered me from teacher training. We were in different programs so we didn’t see each other often, but I made an impression the one time our classes were combined by our Methods professor. This is how she recounted it:

“I thought you were such a bitch. The professor told us to assign the reading and then gave us ideas to debrief it with our students. You raised your hand and asked a question and it was like a bomb went off. You said, ‘What if they don’t read?’ And the professor responded with, ‘If you do what I’m saying they will read.’ And then you said, ‘Nope, I’ve done that. They didn’t. What else can I do?’ And she gave you something else which you’d tried. You told her that didn’t work either and asked again and again until she had nothing else to give you. Then you laughed. I felt sorry for her at the time and angry at you, but now I know where you were coming from and I can’t believe how poorly we were prepared for reality.”

I didn’t know how to get my students to learn, but at least they liked me. English, though? They hated English.

They hated it so much it was like an allergy. They actively avoided the practice necessary to internalize the skills to “do English.”

I thought that I could work harder and make my lessons better. That I could incorporate music they loved, turn writing and reading into a game, go off-script and choose texts with real-world relevance for my academically impoverished fellow chicanos.

Nothing worked. In class they were engaged (mostly), but the engagement didn’t translate onto their assessments, where I measured learning.

Colleagues chalk it up to poverty, the achievement gap, lack of early childhood education, language barriers, etc., ad nauseum, ad infinitum. If you go onto any article decrying the state of education today, within three comments, you’ll find a teacher claiming schools can’t be held accountable for student learning if kids live in poverty.

I didn’t buy that, though. Every year there I worked my ass off, trying to balance the needs of my 200 kids at school with the needs of my actual family at home. Things would get better, but only marginally. My inputs were far, far greater than the output in student success. Anyone who has a background in business understands that when marginal cost exceeds marginal benefit, the best idea is to shut it down.

So I moved. To the kind of school most teachers dream of, where students monitor their own grades and are proactive about protecting their GPA, where parents are engaged but not overbearing, where kids’ basic needs are met at home so they arrive prepared to succeed. Most plan to attend college.

And yet… these kids aren’t learning much of anything either. Sure, they get good grades and they “do” enormous amounts of work, but are they skilled when they leave? Are they knowledgeable about any of the compulsory core subjects?

Not really.

Why?

Because they’ve learned that the work teachers assign in school is usually not reviewed closely, rarely receives meaningful feedback, and more often than not, is not required to score well on multiple-choice tests.

In other words, as long as the work looks done, they get points. When the test comes, more often than not, the teacher helpfully provides a study guide which kids can use to cram the night before the test and still do well. In some cases, the study guide is the test and the teacher gives the kids the answers to it the class before. Cramming is the #1 skill we teach in schools, even though in the age of Google, recall is less and less necessary and application is everything.

The incentive structure in schools is perverse, and I mean that in the strictest sense of the term, i.e. turning away from its prescribed course. These incentives create a vicious feedback loop that does nothing to give kids what their brains are geared for: real learning.

Teachers are under no requirement to ensure students learn the material; they are required to make sure kids pass classes. What’s the easiest way to do that? Make sure they get a passing grade. I’ll never forget my department chair telling us, in an official department meeting, “Give ’em all Ds and everyone wins. You don’t see a problem kid again, admin gets what they want, and the kid graduates.”

Unethical as hell, but logical, given the insanely long list of demands on teachers.

School leadership makes sound recommendations for pedagogical improvements, i.e., they tell us how to teach better. However, the way the system is set up makes solid, skills-focused pedagogy nearly impossible in practice. We’re supposed to differentiate instruction, i.e., customize learning experiences for each kid to meet them where they are, but we’re also supposed to do this in heterogeneous classrooms, which means our classes contain a random mixture of special ed students, Honors students, English Language Learners, “average kids”, and kids we tactfully refer to as “intentional non-learners.” And the student to teacher ratio in too many classrooms is 35 to 1.

We’re not even talking about all the other parts of the job: socio-emotional learning, building relationships, communicating with parents, designing meaningful assignments, building appropriate assessments, and creating a classroom climate conducive to learning which means not only minimizing student-to-student antagonism, but also helping students build collegiality with people with whom they may not gel. Even if this was possible, it is a Herculean (if not a Sisyphean) task.

Yet the only time admin actually gets on my case is when I have too many Fs in my gradebook.

Hmmmm… what to do? What to do?

Well, let’s do the math. The typical high school teacher has 200+ students. There is no compensation for the additional hours of labor required to ensure that students learn content and skills to mastery, and those hours are very large in number. Ask Rafe Esquith, the only teacher awarded the National Medal of the Arts by the President of the United States if you don’t believe me. Or ask his wife.

Some people will point to ethics here. They’ll say that we don’t teach because of the money, we are remunerated in satisfaction.

Except where is that satisfaction? It’s not coming from the kids. They are decidedly unappreciative when you introduce rigor and real work into the classroom. That’s not because they don’t crave real learning, it’s because school is not for real learning or rigor in their experience. In effect, you’re flipping the script on them when you insist on hard work. You can overcome the resentment if you’ve got great relationships with your students, but it’s really hard to build great relationships with 35 kids at once.

The saying “What gets measured gets done” is just as applicable to schools as businesses. Virtually the only thing that matters for a teacher to keep her job are grades, even though grades don’t measure learning; grades measure obedience.

The old guard knows that they have to do just enough to stay out of the crosshairs of administration. They have to talk a good game in the presence of principals and assistant principals, but behind the doors of their classroom, it can be business as usual. There are far too many classrooms and far too many other pulls on their time for the administrative team to pop in to regularly review classroom practice. So if you primarily lecture, you’re probably fine. If you are a packet-giver-outer, that’s okay. If you are an end-of-chapter-question assigner, you’re good too just as long as there aren’t too many Fs at the end of the semester.

Administration cannot accurately measure student growth. All the objections to standardized testing are legitimate. Principals can’t talk to every kid. They’re certainly not going to read piles of essays, even if they were assigned across the curriculum (they aren’t).

The easiest way to measure student performance (and teacher performance) is to look at grades.

And who controls those?

So this is what we’ve got here:

• Teachers whose main performance measurement is students grades, which they control
• Students who want to graduate but are habituated to busy work by the time they get to high school
• Administrators who need their policy changes to appear to “work” to move up the ladder of District leadership
• School scores largely based on graduation rates
• Families who like high school scores because they protect property values.

Everybody has a reason to want high graduation rates, which come from passing grades.

Only a sado-masochist would buck this trend.

Kids aren’t lazy. Teachers aren’t lazy. Both groups will, however, do what human evolution has programmed deep into their brains: expend the least labor necessary to survive.

I can’t help but think of that old Soviet line: We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.