My last piece did not have concrete suggestions for how to improve education and how to make life better for teachers. So, I should go through my credentials first. This is my 25th total year in education. I have taught Social Studies and English in high schools and intermediate schools. I have taught in public and private high schools. I was also an elementary counselor for a few years. I’ve spent the last ten years as a special education teacher, support facilitator, and case manager. I haven’t done it all, but I’m close.

1. No more STAAR and any other state equivalent.

As George W. Bush once said, “is our children learning?” The idea behind standardized testing is okay in theory. We want to know if we are teaching the same stuff and if our students are learning that stuff. Using a company to complete that exam is wasteful spending (to tune of well over a billion per state). Not only that, but these tests take four and five hours. This is especially cruel at the elementary level. You aren’t measuring reading skills, writing skills, or math skills. You are measuring endurance.

Most districts have instructional coaches or what we call instructional specialists. They can write local exams for the district.  These tests would measure those same things but in far less time. If I can sit for a test for 30 minutes to an hour then the chances of me concentrating throughout that entire increase geometrically. What most citizens don’t get is how many days we lose to these exams. You have four different days lost to five STAAR exams. You have a mock exam for each one of those as well. That’s another four days. Then, each class has common assessments usually once a six weeks on average. There are six days right there in that particular class. Then, you get the SAT and PSAT. Seniors will take something called the TSIA. Last year we took a field test for the STAAR that lost us another couple of days. Look up and you are losing a month. That doesn’t even count the days where we specifically cover STAAR strategies.

2. Let Educators Write the Curriculum 

For a brief moment let’s ignore critical race theory and issues specifically related to social studies. Focusing on Texas for a second, we have stuff we call Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). Each course has over 20 with some as many as 30. How in the hell does anyone expect to adequately address all of those thoroughly in a school year? Remember, we are losing a month to standardized testing. We miss more class time with lockdown drills, fire drills, shooter drills, and all of the other nonsense that normally occurs.

Teachers have been trained to identify those things which we would call “power standards.” In other words, they are non-negotiables that we want every kid to know. Each course will have between 6 and 12 of those a year. Focusing on those allows each kid to demonstrate mastery and people to grow up actually knowing and understanding things. Collectively we know a lot about how people learn. We know what they need to know and what is more trivial. We’ve been trained to do this. Let us do it. You don’t call a carpenter to fix your toilet. You don’t go to a podiatrist to remove your appendix. Politicians don’t know what we do. They may have reading skills, writing skills, and math skills but they don’t understand how you effectively teach this to children. Don’t tell us what to teach. Don’t tell us how to teach it unless you happen to be an expert.

3. Pay Veteran Teachers More

This will be an unpopular opinion, but rookie teachers are fairly compensated. I mentioned this yesterday, but I get less than 15,000 more than a rookie teacher 25 years in. I have a masters degree and a special education stipend that augments my salary. The “steps” between years end up being about 600 dollars a year. When I get to year 25 in most districts I no longer get steps. In short, the difference between me today and me when I was a rookie is night and day. I knew a lot about my content but I knew very little about how to get that knowledge to the students. Furthermore, there is a ton of accumulated wisdom that has nothing to do with teaching directly, but makes me far better at my job.

If a teacher gets a masters in their teaching field I would give them an extra 5000 a year instead of just one. I would double the gap between steps. Teachers normally bail before their fifth year. I’d give bonuses at five year intervals to reward teachers for staying. In short, you want wiser and more experienced teachers. Youth and enthusiasm is great, but we need teachers to stay. They will stay if you reward them with something more than jeans days and breakfast tacos in the lounge.

 

For those that don’t know, this is teacher appreciation week. Don’t worry. I’m not fishing for compliments or gifts or anything like that. I simply bring this up to point out an obvious point that our beloved governor seems to have missed. He set up a task force.

It seems he doesn’t understand why there is a teacher shortage. We’ve talked in these spaces before about how the task force was set up at first. The first iteration had only two teachers with one housed at their district’s administrative office. Talk about missing the pulse of the people. You don’t have to be an educator or an expert in education to see the problem there.

The other problem is manifest in the week they chose to make teacher appreciation week. They’ve done this before and it never donned on anyone to somehow switch this up. In addition to being teacher appreciation week, it is also the week where we give the Biology, Algebra, and U.S. History state exams. It’s also the same week where most of the AP exams are given.

We appreciate you so much. Why don’t you wear jeans this week. We’ll have some nice breakfast burritos for you in the faculty lounge. Oh, also remember that if you do something wrong while proctoring the STAAR test we will be sure to pull your teacher’s license. Don’t forget your parting gift on the right.

Do we really need to ask why people are leaving the profession or refusing to enter it in the first place? I know some of you can’t get past the paywall but the headline here says it all. For those that don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, it says that a federal audit revealed that HISD under spent by 300 million dollars over a five year period.

Some guestimates conclude that HISD could raise their teacher salaries $10,000 a year across the board without batting an eye. These things usually filter their way down to neighboring school districts. No one wants to be left in the dust when the district next door suddenly boosts pay. However, it would be a big mistake if the task force concludes that we just need more money. Make no mistake, I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth, but the idea of this particular week being teacher appreciation week is kind of a clue.

I had a lull in the middle of my career where I could have gone in other directions. Some here know that well. Ultimately, teaching was my first and best destiny. It just took awhile to find a place where I was comfortable and belonged. We often drop young teachers in the toughest places to teach with the most difficult situations to overcome. We offer very little support and then wonder why so many leave. It shouldn’t take blue ribbon committees and millions of dollars to figure this out. Just about any teacher can tell you this if you stop long enough to listen.

While testing a group of 10th graders for their STAAR exam, I got an email from our testing coordinator. “Congratulations, you have been selected to administer the TSIA tests.” If you aren’t in education you have no idea what either of those two tests are. Many of us in education barely know. In addition to all of this we have three more STAAR tests in early May and the more driven students have AP exams around that time as well.

The TSIA stands the the Texas State Initiative Assessment. It is given to students before they graduate to determine if they need to take remedial classes at a community college before they can take the courses that really count.

Since January 1st, we have taken mock STAARs for the five different STAAR exams, we took a field test for the English STAAR because we were fortunate enough to have the state of Texas choose our school to give that exam. We have administered the SAT, both English STAAR exams, and the TSIA, AP Exams, and the other three STAAR tests will come between now and the end of the school year.

Students are told they have to pass all five STAAR tests in order to graduate. They are told they have to pass the TSIA in order to avoid paying for remedial classes that don’t count towards any degree. Teachers are told that they have to follow all of the rules or their teaching certificate could get pulled or we get drawn and quartered.

It obviously gets to the point where we have to ask exactly what we are measuring. I think all of us get it on a certain level. We want to see what students have learned. We want to make sure teachers are teaching the curriculum. We want to know if students have the skills they need to succeed in the real world. All of these are reasonable points and reasonable questions to ask.

What isn’t reasonable is putting all of that pressure on a child. What isn’t reasonable is putting all of that pressure on those teaching those children. What isn’t reasonable is designing a test where students sit for five hours fighting off fatigue and boredom to try to master a difficult test. Apparently, too many students are passing. So, the state is dramatically altering each STAAR test to make them more challenging. This is all happening during a pandemic.

Silly me, but I thought the whole point was to test whether students had mastered the skills necessary to succeed in the real world or in college. Has that changed dramatically in the last several years? Are we really adjusting to the changing times or are we simply punishing educators and kids for cracking the code to beat the test?

Meanwhile, the anxiety gets ratcheted up. A typical ninth grade student (at the tender age of 14 or 15) will take practice tests for three different STAAR tests, will take common based assessments each six weeks in all four core subject areas, will take three different STAAR exams, and will sit for the school day PSAT. That assumes they aren’t taking any AP exams. If you do the math, that’s more than 30 high stakes tests. One might wonder if you have time to do anything else.

Testing is also big business. One is free to wonder whether we really are making education better or simply filling the pockets of some powerful donors. Any good teacher wants to know that what they are doing is successful. We want to know that students are learning and that what they are learning is useful. In many cases, we are capable of doing that on our own or people within our district are capable of designing tests that can do that. They won’t take five hours we don’t have to scare the kids and threaten them. We just want to know what they know. That’s pretty easy right?

These screeds usually come out in the morning, but I couldn’t do it this morning. I was administering a STAAR test. For those out of state, that is the acronym for our state testing. We take five of those tests throughout high school and students are expected to pass them all in order to graduate.

Except they don’t have to pass them all. Special education students can be excused from taking them after making several attempts. Other students can have an alternative packet they fill out in order to get the same credit. Still others can simply graduate with a different diploma as long as they pass three of them. Are you sufficiently confused?

The students are smart enough to see through our bluff. They have friends that have managed to walk without passing it. These tests are normally done in the spring, but retesters have to take it in December as well. I always administer the English test. Students are given five hours (or more) to answer around 50 multiple choice questions asking them to comprehend reading passages, edit reading passages, and revise reading passages. Then, they have to write either an expository or persuasive essay.

The students taking these tests again run the gamut. Some of them are great kids that just don’t have the skills necessary to make it. Unlike all of the other STAAR tests, the English tests are skills based. You can’t study for them. You either know how to read and correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation or you don’t. You either know how to write or you don’t.

The rest fall under two categories. Either they know they don’t have to pass and don’t care or they cannot keep themselves awake through the five hours. At some point you start to wonder what exactly we’re measuring. You have the poor girl  =asking questions every few minutes and I can’t answer any of them. You have the little turd who announces loudly that he is done with the test after 13 minutes.

Then you have the three or four boys that somehow take apart their chair and throw the pieces at each other. They wait to do this when I am waking up the same three or four girls for the 20th time. Citizens of the state are paying billions of dollars to large corporations so they can write these tests and we can torture these children. Ultimately that is all we are accomplishing.

That’s the whole point. When you fail the test in the spring, you take it again in the summer and then again in December if you don’t pass. Then you go back to the top of the slide and do it again in the spring if you don’t pass it that time. Some students take the same test up to seven times before they are seniors in high school. No wonder they sleep. No wonder they act like 12 year olds. No wonder they just fill it out in 15 minutes. They know the process will start over no matter what. Asking a child to take a test seven or eight times is child abuse. It’s sadism wrapped up in fake accountability.