My last post was about Common Core, and this one will be about an assessment my students did with our student teacher this week, and how that could look under some models of Common Core that have been pushed forward.

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In response to Don’t Be Snowed on the Complexity of Unwritten Common Core Assessments, I’ve pulled this post out of the dust-bin of “Drafts”…

Many teachers at my site were scrambling to get more PD hours as the school year winds down, so we had a presentation from  a fellow teacher who is on the district’s Common Core working group. She’s a great teacher. She does ELD and intervention pull-outs part-time, and fills in with subbing on her off days. I’ve shared a bit of what I’ve found and written with her already.  The scary part is how different what I’m hearing at the “macro” level is compared with what is disseminated at the local level. The focus was on the ELA standards.

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1. Create a system where teachers at one school are outside the seniority structure of the district
2. Spend a lot of money on training and consultants that promise “miracle” cures to the academic ills of your students – mouth banalities about consistent high expectation, rigor, etc.
3. Tell teachers that only you and they care about the students, and either state (or imply) any former staff members did not
4. Give the site administrator complete hiring and firing authority over staff so they can take “decisive action” to “improve the school environment”
5. When “old hands” (if there are any left) on campus call “baloney sandwiches”, remove them
6. Replace with new low-seniority teachers who are “loyal” to the students (and your program)
7. Rinse, repeat, etc. creating a cult of personality….
8. When folks outside question what’s going on, they just don’t appreciate that you (and your staff), and only you, give a cr@p about the kids.
9. Nourish a sense of under-appreciation, and attack any questions, or critique as a mortal enemy.
10. Soon all, you’re left with are low-seniority teachers at these schools – start arguing that they are better than “experienced” teachers, and ask for HQT waivers.

Someone on #edchat on twitter posted a quip that was hard to figure out about auto repair shops and how we didn’t get to know our “customers” in education. Twitter is like a cocktail party, and I definitely walked into that conversation mid-way, so he might have been making an excellent point, but I really do not like using the word “customer” to describe the families that we serve as public school educators. I don’t like it because it makes a number of assumptions about customers, and the service they receive in private businesses.

Public schools take all comers. The number of students going to “alternative” placements is pretty darn small, and even then, their education is still the financial and legal responsibility of the school district where they live. Private business do not have to serve anyone who comes through their door.

Look at the sign above. It looks similar to a list of “rules” you might see in some classrooms (we can quibble about the wording, etc.), but here is what’s different about a classroom, and a business…that line in the middle about reserve the right to refuse service to anyone who causes a disturbance. When a kid in my class causes a disturbance, I may be able to remove him, but you can bet, I’ll have to provide him with more services as the weeks go on.  Refusing to provide service will not be an option.

If I were a “business” I could refuse to keep that child as a “customer”, and  I’d have no responsibility to find him an alternative to my services. Business have a myriad of methods to avoid having certain customers, to get rid of customers they no longer desire, and to limit and segregate customers to maximize profits and minimize their risk. I don’t get to refuse customers. Playing favorites with my students, the way that businesses do with their customers, is not considered a “good” practice in my profession. I do not have customers because I have more respect for my students and families than to treat them that way.

Photo credit: House Rules by Lynn Friedman, on Flickr

This has been a hard “Spring” in some ways, but easier in others. One part of the “hard” has been the fact that I’m in one of the few local districts that still does a Spring Break aligned with Easter, and this year, that wasn’t until last week. Both students and adults were more than ready for a “time out” by the time that last week rolled around it was not pretty. Rather than focusing on that, I’m going to share this audio recording of class discussion on the Constitution I made on Friday which went pretty well. The kids have a less than perfect understanding of text, because we only had about 2 days with the selection they were reading on the subject (normally they’d have three or four).  I will just point to the fact that this discussion meets few of the Common Core standards in ELA of informational text, but it shows the higher level of thinking and the type of analysis that I’d prefer they make.

I was discussing this with my husband. He was a bit precocious as youngster, and once did a bang-up job on a history essay by adding some background information gleaned from his own reading (he has always read history for pleasure, not just when required to). His teacher was livid that he had included outsider information, and didn’t stick to the text. Once again, I’m not concerned that Common Core is something new and scary, but has the potential to be the same old same old.

California is like the rest of the country…only sooner

Image Credit: Number – 26 by szczel, on Flickr”