Teacher Misery

by Jane Morris

  Michael’s partner introduced him as “Michaela” and she looked quite reluctant as she repeated his three words, “caring, quiet, tranny.” I was about to correct her and say that it said Michael on my attendance list, but the word tranny cleared that up.

  Besides that first introduction, Michaela stayed completely quiet in class for the next two months. She worked diligently and was an excellent student. Then suddenly she was absent for three straight weeks. Worried, I called home to ask about her absences. I introduced myself and before I could get the word “Michaela” out, the student’s mom said, rather abruptly, “Thank you for your concern. My son has not been feeling well. Please send work to the main office for us to pick up,” and hung up.

  I dropped off work to the office every day, but it was never picked up. Another week went by and I was still concerned. I emailed an administrator. I was told that Michael would be coming back to school shortly and that I should excuse him from any of the work that he had missed during his absence. This is not the usual policy for absences. Students are generally held accountable for any work they may have missed. But I didn’t want to rock the boat.

  Michaela returned to school soon after that and when I asked her how she was feeling, she answered, “What do you mean?” with a rather blank stare.

  “I just want to make sure that you’re feeling okay,” I replied. “We’ve missed you.”

  “I’m not sick,” she said, with a flat affect.

  “Okay. I’m glad to hear that. Welcome back.”

  Now I was really confused. Ironically, in class that day we were having a discussion about gender roles in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Not long into the discussion Michaela asked to be excused. I asked if everything was okay and she walked past me and out the door without answering. Her friend Apple that she had been sitting next to asked if she could check on her. I agreed.

  The friend came back at the end of class and explained that Michaela was having a hard time. I asked for more details and she said that she couldn’t give me any. She had been sworn into secrecy.

  Now I was really concerned. I went to speak with Michaela’s guidance counselor in person. I told her everything that I knew and asked her to fill in the holes for me. She said that Michael and his parents had requested complete privacy and that she could not tell me anything. I told her not to call him Michael because he prefers to go by Michaela. She was a bit surprised and said she had never heard that before.

  Since I couldn’t get any information out of the guidance counselor, I tried to forget about it until Michaela was gone for two weeks again. I spoke to another guidance counselor, who has a pretty big mouth, and she told me the details.

  “You didn’t hear this from me. That kid is suicidal and homicidal.”

  “Wait. What? What do you mean homicidal?”

  “He has tried to kill himself numerous times due to gender identity issues.

  His parents refuse to acknowledge the fact that he identifies as a girl.”

  “That is horrible. Absolutely horrible. But did you say something about homicide?”

  “Yes. He took pictures of himself in a dress and sent them to his friends. Then he freaked out and threatened to kill those friends if they showed the pictures to anyone.”

  “Well, I’m sure it was just a figure of speech.”

  “He brought a knife to school.”

  “What?”

  “Yup. And his best friend Apple showed the cops a bunch of text messages that she received from him where he threatened to kill her.”

  “Apple? She’s in my class! They sit next to each other for god’s sake! Why wouldn’t they tell me?”

  “The parents don’t want anyone to know anything.”

  “So has he been in jail this whole time?”

  “No. He’s been in an institution.”

  “And they didn’t think that I needed to know about this? I’m his teacher. We talk about very sensitive topics in class like suicide and gender roles.”

  “I know but if the parents request privacy, the school has to follow.”

  “But I need to ensure the safety of the other students, especially Apple!”

  She shrugged and said she understood. When Michaela came back to school a few days later, she was no longer sitting next to her friend. Michaela was out of school for most of the semester. When she was in class, I was always a little worried and went over in my head what I would do if she took out a weapon. I don’t know what ever came of that situation but the following year I saw Michaela in the hallway in a floral dress. She had the same cropped haircut, mustache, and muddy sneakers yet she was proudly wearing the type of dress that little girls wear to church on Sunday. I called out to her and asked how she was doing. She smiled brightly, which I had never seen before and replied, “Great!” She seemed to be embracing her gender identity and it was nice to see.

  NOT A TEAM PLAYER

  For a while, the school had a very strict I.D. policy. Every student was given a picture I.D. and they were expected to wear it around their necks at all times. This became a huge disciplinary issue because, of course, students never wanted to wear it. It took a considerable amount of class time every day to check that each student was wearing their I.D., and to go through the line of questioning for all the students who were not wearing it. Those who didn’t have one had to leave class to get a replacement sticker from the office. In classes where it was impossible to get kids to follow reasonable rules, the I.D. thing was a gigantic pain in the ass. But I went through the I.D. routine every day, just in case an administrator walked by.

  One day, in a particularly unruly class, the Ass. Principal dropped in for a surprise observation. I had already taken twenty minutes to go through the dreadful I.D. check, and miraculously, every kid was wearing their stupid I.D. Yet the bigger miracle was that on a Friday afternoon, in a class filled with thirty struggling teens with major disciplinary and attention issues, the entire class was quiet and working diligently. Anyone who knew the typical context of the class would have been amazed at what I had gotten these students to do. It was no small feat and I was very proud. But apparently, that’s not what the administrator was concerned with. I received the following write-up in my mailbox:

  “I am extremely concerned that one student is not wearing his I.D. This is a very strict policy the school has been enforcing for various safety reasons, and Ms. Morris shows that she is not a team player by not enforcing the rules in her classroom. A copy of this form will be in her permanent file.”

  I was not given a chance to explain that the student’s I.D. came off when he removed his sweatshirt. There was also no mention of the lesson plan or quality of student work. Apparently, just like students, teachers have a “permanent file” that follows them throughout their career. And my little transgression would remain there throughout my years, even though the I.D. policy was completely eliminated the following year.

  WHAT IS THIS CCRAP?

  A 2016 Educational Policy Primer

  The issues of Common Core State Standards (curriculum standards for the nation), and the PARCC test that is administered to test for those standards, are extremely complicated. It is a matter of how far down the rabbit hole one wishes to go. I will introduce you to the essential facts, in case you are unaware of what this all means, and then I will share my personal experience with it as an educator.

  I. What is this CCRAP you speak of?

  The Common Core State Standards Initiative is an “educational assembly” in the U.S. that specifies what K-12 students should know in English and math at the end of each grade level. According to their website, “The initiative seeks to establish consistent educational standards across the states as well as ensure that students graduating from high school are prepared to enter credit-bearing courses at two- or four-year college programs or to enter the workforce.”[17]

  The Common Core Standards are now the law in 46 states. The reason that most states have adopted the Common Core is not because t
hey agree with it, but because they wish to receive competitive grants that were introduced on July 24, 2009, as an incentive for educational improvement.[18] To qualify, states had to adopt standards and tests that are supposedly “internationally benchmarked” to prepare students for future success. States could use their own standards and still qualify for the grants, but they were given extra points in their grant submissions if they agreed to implement the Common Core standards by August 2, 2010.[19] We are talking about $4.35 billion in federal funds. Some states, like Massachusetts, got rid of their own effective standards and replaced them with the Common Core, to get millions in federal funds.[20]

  II. Cash Rules Everything Around Me

  There is nothing wrong with having high standards for education, and most teachers already meet most of these standards in the classroom. But when taking a closer look at the origins of the standards there are several red flags. According to Diane Ravitch, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education, “There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that these standards will improve achievement, enrich education, and actually help to prepare young people — not for the jobs of the future, which are unknown and unknowable — but for the challenges of citizenship and life. The biggest fallacy of the Common Core standards is that they have been sold to the nation without any evidence that they will accomplish what their boosters claim.”[21]

  According to the creators of the Common Core, they relied heavily on public feedback throughout the writing of the standards and assessments. But if you look at the section of “public feedback” on the Core Standards website it is quite deceptive. “First of all, calling the feedback ‘public’ is wrong: the organizers of the standards would not make public the nearly 10,000 comments they say they received from citizens. The summary quotes 24 respondents-less than 1/4 of 1 percent of the total-selectively chosen to back up their interpretation of the results.”[22]

  When researching the Common Core State Standards, I began to wonder who exactly created them. It is not an easy task to find the authors of the Common Core. But after much digging, I found a list of 135 people who created and revised the Common Core Standards. In all, only seven of the 135 members were actual classroom teachers and no one was a K-3 classroom teacher or had any training in early childhood education.[23] We are told that teachers helped create the standards, but that is simply not the case. Educators with actual classroom experience would be able to write standards and exams that are challenging yet developmentally appropriate. However, my concern is not really with the standards, but more with the test that was created to check that the standards are being implemented.

  The PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) test is a Common Core-aligned test designed by the for-profit company Pearson, which was paid $360 million in federal funds to write these exams.[24] Pearson is a multinational corporation, and the world’s largest education company and book publisher, earning more than $9 billion annually.[25] They own nine publishing houses, including Penguin, Harcourt, Puffin and Prentice Hall. They also own part of the University of Phoenix.

  Currently, Pearson produces expensive testing materials for 18 states in the

  U.S. Their contract in Texas alone is worth $500 million. They own the General Education Development tests (GED), the edTPA, and the NES, required teacher licensure tests that people pay over $100 to take. They also own the Quotient, a test for ADHD in students; the test for National Board Certification of teachers; the SAT-10, a test that measures reading and writing skills for grades K-2; and SuccessMaker, a digital learning curriculum that teachers have been forced to use in grades K-8. Pearson owns online for-profit charter schools called Connections Academy too. Obviously if a student uses Pearson texts and curriculum they will perform higher on Pearson’s standardized tests. It’s no wonder that Pearson was a major supporter of the creation of the Common Core Standards.[26]

  Another way that Pearson rakes in the cash is by including product placements in their tests. In a 2013 English assessment, a reading selection included “root beer which was referred to at one point as MugTM Root Beer. It was followed by a footnote, which informed test-takers that MugTM was a registered trademark of PepsiCo.”[27] They have also included references to IBMTM, Lego®, FIFA® and MindstormsTM.[28] While Pearson will say they do not receive any money for these product placements, in many cases they are linked to the businesses which are mentioned. For example, Pearson recently partnered with Lego to create a line of educational products.[29] Also, IBM was awarded a contract in 2012 to create the “technology architecture” for the PARCC.[30]

  Another alarming aspect of a private company owning these tests is that they have access to student data with very little oversight. Pearson may sell personal data related to individual children who have taken the PARCC. They cannot guarantee the security of this private student data, and have never made clear precisely how they will use it.[31] Not surprisingly, IBM has shown interest in storing this data.

  So far there is absolutely no proof that the Common Core standards, Common Core curriculum, and Common Core testing, will in any way end what is referred to as the achievement gap.[32] This gap refers to the difference in achievement (including test scores, graduation rates, and college enrollment) between lower income and higher income students. This gap is present in all nations around the world.

  The only nationwide study on the probable costs of applying the Common Core and PARCC estimates costs of almost $16 billion over seven years.[33] Currently, hundreds of millions of tax dollars are going to corporations for the creation of curriculum and tests as well as the technology used to implement the test, all under the guise of closing the achievement gap. But this ignores so many of the significant issues that are the cause of the achievement gap, such as poverty. The amount of homeless children in Colorado alone, a state which has adopted the PARCC test, has more than tripled in the last decade. Imagine what that money could do for those children. It could even simply provide them with a nourishing breakfast every morning. Obviously if a student is well-fed, they will perform better in school. “We know quite clearly that children who have quality nutrition, healthcare, as well as access to books via libraries with certified librarians, and all the other resources provided to children in particular zip codes, actually, have done quite well on standardized tests in the past. Yet, we continue to ignore this fact, and we continue to feed our children living in poverty only tests.”[34] In order to pay for the creation of these assessments and the technology and materials they require, we disregard critical resources such as new books, smaller class sizes, librarians, nurses, counselors and much more.

  In my own district, I have seen this huge waste of money firsthand. Millions have been spent on Chromebooks for the mere purpose of taking the PARCC test, a test that 15 states have recently dropped. Meanwhile, we are told that there is a budget crisis and, once again, teachers are warned of frozen salaries and higher rates for health insurance. Due to budget cuts, there are already much larger class sizes and fewer guidance counselors, social workers, teachers’ assistants, librarians, psychologists, social workers, special education teachers, reading specialists, and security guards. Our massive school, with thousands of students, recently lost our sole police liaison due to funding issues. This is a huge loss for the safety and security of the students and teachers. We often have violent fights, gang activity, etc. that need police intervention, and the lack of that one police officer has led to quite an increase in these incidents.

  Another aspect of our school that suffers due to budget cuts is funding for the arts, physical education, foreign language programs, and other subjects that are essential for the well-being and well-rounded education that our students deserve. As more money is provided for standardized tests, less money is available for the vital programs and services that all schools should provide.

  III. 15-year-old Professors of Classical Roman Literature

  Besides the sheer waste of tax dollars, there�
��s the problem of the impossibility of the tests themselves. New York has given Common Core tests for the last two years, and both resulted in approximately a 70 percent failure rate state-wide.[35] The Nathan Hale Senate-a body, made up of teachers, administrators, parents, and students-voted unanimously that the PARCC test was inappropriate for the age groups it tests. “The vote was taken after careful consideration and much discussion and inquiry, including two school community forums.[36] It is basically public knowledge that students will perform poorly on this test. Yet according to the No Child Left Behind Act and other school reform processes, standardized test scores like these are used to fire teachers, reduce their pay, hold students back and close down schools.

  Just to give you a general idea of how impossible the tests are, here is a breakdown of the reading levels required to understand the passages on the test. The Lexile number for proficient readers in 4th grade is around 800. Yet the passages on the PARCC are at a level of 1100, which is the average level of an 8th grader.[37] The average 11th grader reads at a 1250 Lexile range. Yet the reading selections on the PARCC go all the way to a Lexile level of 1470. To give you a more worldly application, reading a driver’s manual requires a 1220, for a nurse to perform his or her job it’s 1310, and for a scientist the level is 1450.[38]

  Allow me to give you an even clearer picture of how the PARCC reading selections and essay prompts are inappropriate. Third graders are asked to write an essay on how a character’s words and actions are important to the plot of the story. Fourth graders must analyze the structural elements of a Maya Angelou poem. Sixth graders write an essay that identifies a similar theme in two complex texts and compare and contrast the approaches each text uses to develop that theme. Seventh graders read and analyze a passage from The Count of Monte Cristo written in 1844; the ninth grade test includes an excerpt from Bleak House, a Dickens novel that is usually taught in college; and tenth graders are asked how Ovid structures lines in his poem “Metamorphosis” to add meaning to the events of the poem. If you are reading this, you are probably as smart as the average 10th grader. See if you can answer this question about this excerpt from a 2,000-year-old epic poem: