The kids are so excited to get outside to do their sensory writing exercise today that I give them a bit of a momma-teacher lecture on sticking with me mentally for the directions. It almost makes me wish that we brought them outside so often that they were completely bored with the idea.
“Can we write about the dumpster?” says my posse of three boys. I agree under the condition that they don’t go in the dumpster, which they concede grudgingly; I leave them bending in half over the edges, flashing their boxers, writing on their clipboards and saying things like “Is that a RAT?”
Another boy approaches me. “Are these trees dead?” he asks, in the annoyed tone of seventh grade boys that indicates the presence of a genuine inquiry.
“See those buds?” I point out. “They look dead, but in a few weeks these trees will be covered in leaves.”
The next fifteen minutes are peppered with further wondrous questions:
“Can you smell mud?”
“I heard a train whistle. How could I hear that? There’s no tracks near here.”
“I licked a tree. It tastes like butter.”
“It does not.”
A swarm of students attempt to prove the tree-licker wrong. While I’m simultaneously laughing and hoping desperately that my principal is not looking out her office window, I hear the dull thud of a semi-inflated ball being kicked around. The posse has obeyed the letter of my law, but not the spirit.
“Can I keep this?” one of them shouts joyfully. He pops the dirty, half-dead tetherball into the air with his knee; I remember that the basketball coach has said that he drops baskets with total command. Then my Iraqi student takes over, and we have a demonstration of a different kind of grace. He’s told me that streetball and soccer helped his spirit survive as a refugee in Syria.
The class’ concentration is shot now, so we sneak back into the building along with the tetherball. As they add details to their sensory charts back at their desks, we talk about birdsong; I pull up a recording of a red-winged blackbird– they’re all over the marshy hollows that surround the school.
“OH,” several shout, “I’ve heard that.”
A student turns in his seat, sporting a demeaning arch of his eyebrow. He is an inveterate talker in my class, but he spends hours outside every day on his grandfather’s property. “Who HASN’T heard that??” he demands.
At the bell, as the kids file out, I stop Tetherball Boy. “I want a kick-butt poem about that ball,” I say.
“For extra credit?” he says eagerly, forgetting altogether about bragging to his friend within my earshot this morning about his stupidly low average.
“Done,” I tell him.
“All right,” he rejoices. He shoots off to his next class, laying plans with his buddies to paint the tetherball red and silver when they get home.
I’m super glad Bill Gates knows, as well as other education experts such as economists and Malcolm Gladwell– but it turns out that I had no idea.
The story starts out, as all roads to hell do, with good intentions. Two weeks ago my district provided all ELA teachers with their own in-house jerry-rigged estimations of what our January state exam scores were. (We generally receive these from the state in May, about six weeks before we never instruct the involved students again. The state has also refused to share with districts its score calculation formulas, leaving us as deeply in the dark as, oh, say, students who aren’t provided with transparent assessment expectations. Not that there’s any connection there.)
I was planning to rummage through my own fun house of stats right in front of everyone on the blog. I imagined myself bowing my head over my keyboard with determination and honesty, culling the admiration of my peers and stepping up to self-betterment with statements like “These scores aren’t high enough, and I need to get with the program.” Or “I’m disturbed by what these data indicate about my instruction of English Language Learners.” And then the disillusionment began.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
OK, so I’ll just show that approximately 82% of my students passed the exam, and that means I’m a 82nd percentile teacher. Not great, but not horrible, right? And then I’ll–
Wrong, my child.
Who the hell is that?
I am the Ghost of Statistical Analysis Yet to Come.
Er…there’s fog rolling into my classroom.
I visit those who wander this bleak land looking for dummy variables and fixed teacher effects.
Why can’t I see you?
Few can. (pause) And I have this really neat cloaking device called the New York State Scale Score Conversion Chart.
Um. Okay. So, how can you help me here?
You must remember first, child, that PERCENT is not the same thing as PERCENTILE.
Oh, yeah…this is coming back to me now from…
(eagerly) From a graduate class?…
Uh, no. We’re not required to take statistics in pre-service preparation in New York.
(disapppointed) Oh.
But okay, okay, I remember that thing about percentiles. So THAT means that I actually need last year’s scores for my current students, right? Then, I can compare them to this year’s scores. I’ll see how many of these students scored at or below proficiency last year, how many scored at or below proficiency this year, and THAT will give me my percentile.
Er…
Ok, we’ve got a plan. I just have to…well, I’ll need to email the district data person, because I don’t have the scores from last year. Well, I do, but they’re in this Excel sheet we got in September. I can just cut and paste the jerry-rigged ones in….oh…except… the jerry-rigged ones from 09 are on paper. Hey– do you have any magical powers that can shunt paper scores into already-existing Excel spreadsheets? In alphabetical order? And then massage them so they show something meaningful?
Look, I don’t have any magical powers. I’m not Michelle Rhee.
Well, jeez, no need to get upset.
Your ignorance is starting to become irritating. There are factors you’re not considering.
Oh, yeah, of course… like the 7th grade exam and the 6th grade exam test completely unrelated skill sets, so comparing their scores is useless.
Well, that’s not quite what I–
Or that our state exam is given in January, so Mrs. Johnson’s ability to teach my kids in 6th grade is mixed up with mine in any analysis of the exam scores.
Mrs. Johnson is not really the point–
And Mr. Allbright. Some of his kids are on our team this y–
ANYWAY, you’re still wrong about how to calculate teacher percentile.
I am?
Sigh.
A little tutorial, then. New York City has prepared a document for its teachers which explains how percentiles are calculated for human resources decisions.
I thought that was just an experiment for general knowledge. Isn’t that what the NYC DOE told the participating teachers?
Never mind that. (Waves hand to displace some fog, and a pdf appears).
(reading the pdf) oh….oh….OH. I get it now. So a teacher’s percentile is based on whatever standardized exam the students happen to take in a district from year to year?
Correct.
Not a nuanced national assessment of some kind that all kids have to pass. Or that all teachers have to pass, for that matter.
A what?
Never mind. So the district uses a formula to PREDICT gains for kids from year to year…
Yes…
and then however many of my students meet the predicted gain…
(supportively) Yes…
…is my percentile ranking.
No.
What are all those little brown filaments falling on the floor?
It’s your hair. Don’t worry, it’s a common occurrence around here. Now, there’s one step more you need to take.
OK…(scrutinizes the pdf again)…oh, all right. I have to look at the amount of gains my kids make–
Yes…
on the non-national exam–
Yes, yes–
that may or may not have been controlled for poverty, teacher experience, and non-random teacher assignment–
(cheerfully) But back to percentiles!
(sighs) So when you compare TEACHERS– me– against OTHER teachers in the district, and what percent of us met or didn’t meet the predicted amount of our kids scoring as proficient on the exam–
Yes, that’s right…
then THAT’s my percentile ranking.
You’ve grasped it! Finally!
But–
The exit is right over here. Excuse our dust. We’re constantly renovating, you know.
But–
Now what is it?!
My district hasn’t calculated any of this.
…What?
I said, my district hasn’t calculated a prediction for gains, or done any comparisons of teachers against teachers. So I can’t publicize what my percentile ranking is. I don’t even have the data to calculate it myself.
(long silence)
And anyway, doesn’t this mean that we can’t make any really meaningful comparisons between districts, or states, that use different exams? Or different gain calculation formulas?
Look here. I don’t like your argumentative tone. I’m trying to HELP–
And THEN, the Education Public Interest Center out of University of Colorado recently published a 50 page brief about how there are at least six calculable socioeconomic factors that affect school achievement: and that schools– that is, teachers– cannot overcome them alone. What about that?
(frantically) A good teacher can overcome any obstacles in his way! Just look at KIPP!
Uh, yeah. I will. Right after their teachers unionize because they’re killing themselves trying to overcome alone the six calculable socioeconomic factors that affect school achievement.
(losing control) You know what? I don’t give a crap. Don’t get me wrong. Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don’t know how to read, I don’t care how creative you are. YOU’RE NOT DOING YOUR JOB!!
(Pauses, and heaves a heavy sigh. Begins to weep.)
No one really understands me.
(puts a comforting arm over GOSAYTC’s shoulders)
It’s ok. It’s really ok. I believe in you. We’ll get through this together. Somehow.
(looks around apprehensively at the fog, which is rolling in, in thicker and thicker waves…)
Somehow.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I finished Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains over the weekend, his biography of Dr. Paul Farmer, and it’s working its way in like a splinter. A lot of the inspiration that sticks these days is from writing that is about medicine, or business– anything but teaching. Maybe subconsciously I don’t trust teachers who have time to write. (Yeah, yeah, I know. Shut up.)
Paul Farmer keeps his head organized in an undeniably low-tech fashion:
On the wall beside his desk, Farmer has taped up three sheets of yellow legal lined paper, on every line a task to be completed, and beside each of these a hand-drawn box, in Creole a bwat. [...] The list on the wall contains about sixty imperatives– to assemble the slides for upcoming speeches, to get Lazarus a Bible and nail clippers, to give another patient the wristwatch he bought for him in the Miami airport, to obtain sputum samples from some of the patients with drug-resistant TB and take them to Boston for testing.
I love the word “bwat,” by the way: it has that mudball-splat, no-way-to-get-wussy-about-it sound that should accompany crossing items off a list. How much of genius, I wonder, is just having the tenacity to slug through your checklist, longer and harder than other people?
It appears Farmer works on completing these lists as methodically as he makes them:
We got to the airport early for once, and went to a cafe for breakfast. “Okay,” Farmer said, when we found a table, “time to get to work.” He pulled out his most recent bwat list. Only about two-thirds of the little boxes had been checked. “This is shameful.” He stared at the sheets of paper. “All these bwats were supposed to be done before we left Cuba.”
…which, I think, suggests something important. Farmer insists on a worldview where the universal right to health makes such terms as “cost-effectiveness,” “appropriate technology,” and “triage” absurd. It is a world where decisions about what is accomplished are only defined more or less by what fate happens to put in front of you, as Farmer comments in the case of spending $20,000 to medivac a Haitian patient to Boston.
“The bottom line is, why do we intervene as aggressively as we can with that kid and not with another? Because his mother brought him to us and that’s where he was, at our clinic.”
I don’t pretend to have anywhere near the life-and-death impact of Dr. Farmer in my own line of work. But I would not be a public school teacher if I did not believe in another, similarly universal right of human beings.
I also have a checklist. I triage it daily.
What if I didn’t?
I had kids write short memoirs recently, practicing the kind of reflective, analytical thought of which they’ll need to do more and more as the years go on. “What did you learn from this?” I kept asking them.
“I didn’t learn ANYTHING, Ms. S,” they say, eyes wide and perplexed.
“Every powerful memory we have has taught us something. What did this experience teach you?” I counter.
They slouch down in the conferencing chair, eyes unfocusing, casting their brains back into the past, when they were eight, nine, four years old. Then the light comes on. They sit up and announce triumphantly something like this, for example:
“It taught me not to be afraid of new things. Because, like,” they continue, “Sometimes…you can do something…and once you get into it, it’s not bad. Sometimes it’s….even fun!”
Now, cast these tidbits into a sea of more experienced writers, and you will hear as much as see the upturned noses. That’s boring. Trite. Stupid. “Try something new, it may not be so bad?” Everyone knows that.
Except for the fact that these kids don’t. For real.
My Earth Science friend Joseph, down the hall, has tussled with this in terms of the experiments he asks kids to do. “Is seeing what material floats or sinks in Coke real science? They’re not doing or discovering anything we don’t know already.”
“Yeah,” I say, “But they don’t know it. Isn’t it real science to them?”
Where should our unending search as adults for novelty as quality, for the idolatry of excitement, grind to a halt for just a moment? Where should it give way to delight in the continual rebirth, in each mind, of that which is simply good?
I think it’s with our kids. I think it’s seventh grade.
