Jerking Indiana Students Around

This is from the Marion Community Schools website, published in the Marion Chronicle Tribune, signed by the county school superintendents. My freshman daughter Sophie still faces close to ten more standardized tests even though she's already passed all the tests my oldest step-daughters ever had to pass, caught in the cracks of this madness:

"Here is a look at events that have had a profound impact on our students in Marion, and students around the state:

• Summer 2010: Indiana approves the Common Core Standards, and schools across the state began to develop curriculum and identify supporting instructional resources. 
• 2013/early 2014: (after three years of planning by educators to transition to the new set of standards), Indiana pauses and then formally withdraws from Common Core Standards. 
• April 2014: Indiana State Board of Education formally approves Indiana College and Career Ready Standards (leaving school districts only a few weeks to develop new curriculum and identify supporting resources prior to the start of the 2014-15 academic year). 
• February 2015: Newly developed ISTEP+ test is approved. Educators soon learn it will take 20 hours for students to complete the test. After public outcry, state officials quickly move to cut test down to 12 hours. Different forms of the test are administered to different students, even within the same grade level in a single school district. 
• Spring 2015: New College and Career Readiness test is administered to sophomores. This is separate from and in addition to the End-of-Course Assessments that have been a main component of school accountability at the high school level. At Marion, only a small percentage of students take the additional CCR test in Spring 2015, because information on this test and its impact on school accountability is unclear going into the testing period. 
• Summer through October 2015: A committee works with Indiana of Department of Education to determine passing scores for the new test. During this process it is discovered that paper/pencil versions of the assessment were less difficult than the online versions. IDOE decides to award bonus points to all students who took online versions. Many questions arise as to the validity of this process. 
• Mid-December/January 2015: Finalized ISTEP+ scores are expected to be released and subsequently unembargoed for media/public discussion. This is just a few weeks before the next round of ISTEP+ testing is set to begin (leaving very little time to adjust curriculum and supporting resources based on what the 2014-15 scores reveal). 

"The Bottom Line: Schools had little time to prepare for the changes in standards and assessments that were swiftly enacted last year, and we are still striving to understand what is expected this spring, when we will take the new ISTEP+ again!"

Stephen L. Edwards, interim superintendent, Madison-Grant United School Corporation
Tab McKenzie, superintendent, Mississinewa Community School Corporation
Brad Lindsay, superintendent, Marion Community Schools
Joel Martin, superintendent, Oak Hill United School Corporation

Indiana's Teacher Problem

Closing of Marion schools as students
exit to the county schools.

I thought I'd link to an article yesterday in The Washington Post called, "Indiana's got a problem: Too many teachers don't want to teach there anymore." No doubt there are elements in this article that some will dispute, but some aspects can't be disputed.

The key one is this: the turn over in teachers in the Marion School system this year is epidemic. My sense is that as many as 40% of the teachers in some of the Marion schools did not return this year. As a case in point, my son was scheduled to take a follow-up course with a favorite teacher he had last year for Bio-Med. Thankfully, they were able to find a teacher for this year, but the well-liked teacher is gone. MANY teachers are gone.

There's no disputing the problem. Why are the teachers jumping ship like rats? There is a serious problem here, and someone needs to get to the bottom of it! As this article indicates, it is not just a Marion problem. It is not just an Indiana problem. It is a widespread problem in the US. (So I am not casting aspersion at any of the leadership of the Marion Community Schools.)

Perhaps the most poignant paragraph in the article is this one: "a combination of under-resourced schools, the loss of job protections, unfair teacher evaluation methods, an increase in the amount of mandated standardized testing and the loss of professional autonomy."

That all sounds about right to me. Lots of thoughts. Here's just a few.

• I understand the drive to give choices to parents. But the consequence is that the schools that need the most help get less and less. 
• The behavior problem is MAJOR. I'd say to put those that can behave together regardless of academic ability but I'm not sure how many "behaved" classes you would actually have. All I can think of is having two teachers in many classrooms, with a well-designed system of student removal when problems arise. Again, that means more money to the very schools from which the Indiana legislature is taking it away.
• You can't ignore the lowest common denominator to focus only on the middle and upper classes. The end result is out of control crime, violence, and drug traffic, not to mention a stupid majority. 
• Decades of bureaucratic interference by both parties has sucked all the fun out of teaching. Democrats are notorious for administrative nonsense, and the Republicans in Indiana last year signed into law, was it fourteen hours worth of standardized testing?
• By merit pay linked to student scores, you reward the teachers with easy rural students and penalize those that are willing to teach difficult, inner city students.

I'll leave it at that. But lest I give the wrong impression, my four children have had great teachers and have received an excellent education in the Marion school system. They have also seen lock downs, outbursts, and uncontrolled behavior in a small Indiana town that I never experienced growing up in the Fort Lauderdale, Florida public school system.

Nevertheless, let me again emphatically agree with the principal of Marion High School last week. MHS is still the best high school in the county in terms of its academic offerings. Gifted students who have fled to the counties for better behavior in middle school should come back for high school. The AP and honors possibilities at MHS are unmatched by the county schools, as far as I can tell.

Grandparents become the parents...

I take my elementary school age kids to school most mornings and pick them up a good number as well. This morning I saw a familiar sight. A good natured grandfather pulled up and dropped off two kids, smiling as he watched them run into school.

What caught my attention was that the second one was doing a quasi-"Home Alone" scream as he ran in. At first I thought he might be crying. Nope, grandpa was smiling, although with a look of curiosity on his face. "Why is he yelling?" the look said.

Yesterday when I picked my kids up, I watched a girl who had been talking to one of my children get in the back seat of an old car with two other siblings and, again, grandpa drove them off. There's nothing unusual about this scene I've seen repeated over and over--except that the parents are often in their early twenties, meaning they had these children in high school, sometimes middle school. They're 25; their child is 10. The grandparents become the parents.

Some of the parents are back on track. The girl eventually dumped the loser who got her pregnant. She got an education. She married a winner. Now in her early thirties she's beginning the life she might have had ten years earlier.

Some of the parents aren't on track. They're strung out on drugs, unemployed, living off of welfare, making more money from the government by far than she could earn with a minimum wage job. Their children are on meds... except when mom or dad have sold their meds for money. They might barely hold it together at school when they're on their meds.

But you can be sure no one in their class is going to learn anything if they haven't had their meds. And chances are the school has cut from their budget some of the key people who used to help deal with the out-of-control so that the teacher can at least try to teach the rest.

Where is the shining light? The shining light are the lives that emerge from the abyss. The shining light are the children whose brains are redeemable (some of these children's brains will never be anything close to normal because of what the mother was doing during pregnancy).

The hope are the many volunteers who come to these schools from local churches and the community to work one-on-one with these kids. The hope are the teachers and social workers who for some reason stick with this incredibly difficult job, only to be told by politicians (and here I refer both to Bush and Obama) that they are the problem rather than the broken homes and the society from which these children have emerged.

The hope are the grandparents, who are picking up the pieces for their grandchildren. Sometimes they are redeeming themselves for their own mistakes...

Henry David Thoreau on Marion

I get a sinking, sad feeling often as I make my way around Marion, where I live. Don't get me wrong, IWU is an island (or perhaps bubble) of brilliance. The typical reaction of visiting academics to IWU is "What is all this??? I didn't even know this place existed and it is massive, new, and very, very exciting!!!!" The typical reaction of the prospective student is, "Yep, I'm coming here--for the buildings and student life alone if nothing else."

But once you leave the campus and venture out a bit, the feeling is quite different. I had the sinking feeling last night as the middle aged custodian grandmother with her two grandchildren had to leave her bags behind at the grocery store because she didn't have the money in her account. I had the sinking feeling this morning as I looked at the distant, hopeless look of the lady at the door of Walmart stacking carts together.

Then Thoreau hit me, "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation." But this time I finally felt the pathos of the quote.