And not so long

While I was polishing up the other one, I received a call asking me to focus more on the Common Core, so I rewrote it like this (with some help from my friends Therese and Isabella Pacheco).

Hello. My name is Carol Singletary and I am a National Board Certified teacher with 25 years’ experience teaching high school English and journalism in New Mexico. Last year, I left Clovis high school to teach English at a university. Many of my teacher friends, including my husband, would love to be here today, but if they used one of their leave days, they would be penalized by the new teacher evaluation plan.

So, you have me. And I have never done anything like this before. I hope you don't mind if I read this to you. As an English teacher, reading is my comfort zone..

When I began teaching in 1986 my principal gave me some textbooks, a key to my classroom and the professional autonomy to teach what was best for each group of students.  

Then NCLB, and Race to the Top, and finally, the Common Core State Standards happened. And it all changed.

The Common Core, designed by non-educators and adopted by most states BEFORE they were even written, are a national set of standards for K-12 in English and math meant to ensure all students are college and career ready. Hardwired into these standards, are new tests designed to measure schools’ compliance with the standards.

Do we really want standards designed to ensure kindergartners are “college and career ready”? Because that is the goal of the Core.

They took some arbitrary endpoint desired by business --because as Allan Golston said,   Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools.   outputs?  Our kids are outputs? --They took this endpoint and worked backwards to kindergarten, creating tests all along the way to judge the students' readiness.

Supporters of the Core promote it as a way to more efficiently produce education. As one proponent said “When you have common standards, the result is you can develop all kinds of appliances, materials, that plug into it [just like 110 electricity]… Productivity should increase.”

Just like assembly line manufacturing did for the auto industry in the last century.

But no one seems to be asking why it is a good thing to treat our children like widgets on an assembly line.

Supporters of the Common Core say they are not a curriculum, and they do not dictate how or what schools must teach.    That's not entirely accurate.

Schools may technically be allowed to create their own curriculum, but since our students must be able to pass the newly designed, all-important PARRC tests, the curriculum must align with what will be on the test.

For years I set aside Fridays in my sophomore English classes for self-selected, independent reading. Students read what they cared about, then talked with me about the books they read.

Parents told me it was the best thing for their kids.

Students told me it was their favorite day of the week.

Then my principal told me I was wasting time doing this, and I needed to start teaching close reading of excerpts, because that was what would be on the Common Core tests.

Did you hear that? Reading books in an English class was a waste of time.

Instead, Common Core instructs us to teach Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail without discussing the civil rights movement at all.

Now, more and more days are spent on more and more tests made by outside, for-profit companies. If students do poorly on these tests, the teachers and schools are labeled as failing. The result, of course, is that schools demand their teachers focus only on what is tested.    Last year my school spent forty days on these tests and test prep.

Forty days. . . Eight weeks.. . One quarter of the school year.

And because the Core only covers English and Math, electives are forced to teach to those standards as well, creating literacy based lessons in art, PE and welding classes.

So don't tell me The Common Core does not dictate curriculum.

I can hear Ms Skandera’s reply to my concerns now. She will say, as she says over and over, that I am clinging to the failed status quo.

She keeps using that term but I don't think it means what she thinks it means.

The “status quo” is continuing to use standardized tests, which date back to the Industrial Revolution, to measure students, teachers and schools.

The “status quo” is ignoring the poverty which has plagued our students in New Mexico for decades. Study after study show the only thing standardized tests accurately measure is the socio economic level of the parents. And New Mexico ranks at the bottom of the nation for child welfare.

The “status quo”, at least under this administration, is spending millions of our education dollars on out of state corporations. Heck, out of country corporations like London-based Pearson. And treating our students as outputs for business.

Let me leave with you with one last thought. It is rather ironic that I was asked to come and speak with you about my personal thoughts regarding the Common Core and educational reform. Because when David Coleman, the non-educator and lead “Architect” of the Common Core was promoting the “rigorous objectivity” of the Core he said, “As you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”

Thanks for listening.

Been a long time. . .

I was asked to present a speech before a group of state senators (and press, who never actually showed up due to snow) about education. Here is my first version.

Hello. My name is Carol Singletary and I am a National Board Certified teacher with 27 years experience teaching high school English and journalism. After 24 years at Clovis High School, I left last year to teach English at a university. Why am I, who no longer teaches in K-12 speaking to you? Because my colleagues can not  miss school to come here today or they will be penalized by one of the “multiple measures” of the new teacher evaluation plan. If they use one of the 9 days they are given contractually each year to come here and discuss education with you, they will be penalized.

So, you have me. And I have never done anything like this before. I hope you don't mind if I pretend you are all sophomores in high school.

When I began teaching in 1986 my principal gave me some textbooks, a key to my classroom and the professional autonomy to teach what was best for that group of students. I designed lessons to help them get better at reading, writing, speaking and listening. I got into this profession to help students become a better version of themselves, to help them find a way to be informed citizens of this country. To give them a voice. And for the first fifteen years that's what I did..

And then No Child Left Behind came. . .and things began to change.

Before NCLB, I did my best with each student, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. Sometimes I was the very best teacher for a student, and sometimes I was the worst. That is simply the nature of the interaction between two unique human beings..

After NCLB, we were all rated by a test. One standardized test determined whether my students were successes or failures, and whether they attended a good school or a failing school.

And now, after Race to the Top, that same test will be used to determine whether or not a teacher deserves to lose her job or get a raise.

This latest proposal by Martinez to offer merit pay to the “best” teachers is particularly offensive. For the entire 27 years I taught, I always did my best. I used every method I came across that I thought would work to help my students. I never held back. I never said, “Well, if they just paid me more to be successful then I would use this cool idea to teach my students.”

Setting aside all the studies that show extrinsic rewards, like merit pay, do not work for intellectual activities; or that teachers are not puppies who will roll over if they know they will earn a biscuit for doing so; how is Martinez going to determine these exemplary teachers who deserve to make more money?

She will use her new teacher evaluation plan to measure this. A plan that relies 50% on the Value Added Method which is such a confusing and complicated method even scientists from Sandia Labs couldn't figure it out. AND, it is based exclusively on standardized test scores.

My husband taught special education for 18 years, and is now in a new position teaching industrial arts. He is creating a new Power Mechanics class as well as teaching metals and woodworking. He goes to work at 7 am and comes home at 5 pm every day, then goes back and works some more every weekend. He just won a grant to combine his students with the AP Physics students to build hydrogen fuel cells. College students have heard about this class and want to take it.

Will any of this be reflected on his evaluation? No. Instead he will be ranked based on the school's test scores in reading and math, over which he has absolutely no control. Oh, and on whether or not he uses his leave days. (Which is why he is not here with me today)

If I were reading about this press conference in the newspapers, especially the ABQ paper, I would probably read Skandera's reply about how sad it is that I am clinging to the failed status quo.

So, to paraphrase the Princess Bride  She keeps using that word but I don't think it means what she thinks it means.

The “status quo” is continuing to use standardized tests to measure students, teachers and schools. Standardized tests date back to the Industrial Revolution as an easy way to evaluate large numbers of children quickly. The earliest version of the machine-graded bubble test dates to 1936. Horace Mann introduced the concept of using exams in the 1800's to collect “objective information about the quality of teaching and learning in urban schools, monitor the quality of instruction, and compare schools and teachers within each school.”

The “status quo” is ignoring the poverty which has plagued our students in New Mexico for decades. Study after study show that the only thing standardized tests accurately measure is the socio economic level of the parents. And New Mexico ranks at the bottom of the nation for child welfare.

The “status quo”, at least under this administration, is spending millions of our education dollars on out of state corporations. Heck, out of country corporations. Since Pearson gets so much of our money and they are a multinational corporation headquartered in London.

And finally, the “status quo” is assuming that because teachers work with young people, that we are too stupid to know what should be done.

Last year I was forced to step back and take a hard look at my job. I remembered why I had gone into teaching, to help students get better at reading, writing, speaking and listening;  to help them find a way to be informed citizens of this country; To give them a voice. And I asked myself if I was still able to do that.

I realized the answer was no. I counted up the amount of time spent testing and preparing students for more tests to see if they were ready to take the next test. And I came up with 8 weeks. We spent forty days on testing instead of learning.

I couldn't do that any more. I moved to the university where, at least for now, I can still help students be the very best versions of themselves they can possibly be.

Thank you.

Summer Reading

I love books. In fact, I am  addicted to reading. I will read anything. If I don't have a good book to read, I'll read a bad one. If I don't even have a bad one, I'll read labels and the junk printed on the back of my Albertsons' receipt. Here is a list of what I have read so far this summer. Some of it is worth recommending, and some of it isn't. Much of it is Young Adult stuff that I read so I can recommend it to my students (or they recommended it to me).

In no particular order:

Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys (Fun and slightly silly, but I love his off beat analogies)

Lee Child's 61 Hours (Adventure story, with some plot holes)


Aidan Chambers' Postcards from No Man's Land (WWII YA story alternating between modern Amsterdam, and the end of the war)

Kevin Brockmeier's A Brief History of the Dead (a re-read)

Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking Trilogy (The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer, Monsters of Men) (This is a great series, with an unusual premise: On this planet, men and animals have Noise, which means everyone can hear their thoughts. But it's more about what we'll do in war.)

Simone Elkeles' Perfect Chemistry (This is a fluffy, YA romance novel. Not really my preference.)

Lisa McMann's Cryer's Cross (Creepy book about a possessed schoolroom desk in a small town.)

Liz Williams' Nine Layers of Sky (Not really sure where the title comes from, but it's about an alternate reality in post Soviet Eastern Europe.)

Alex Sanchez's The God Box (Important read for young adults struggling with their religion and sexual orientation.)

Maeve Binchy's London Transport (Binchy is Irish and maybe you could call her a romance novelist, but if so, she's the only one I'll read.)

Walter Dean Myers' Sunrise over Fallujah (Iraq war story much like his Viet Nam novel Fallen Angels.)

Scott Westerfeld's Leviathon (The first in a series of alternate WWI history. Way cool!)

Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker (Post-apocalyptic story set in Orleans)

J. Carson Black's The Shop (Crime/suspense novel)

Chip and Dan Heath's Made to Stick (Looks at how some ideas stick, and others don't)

Stephen Leather's Hard Landing: The First Spider novel (He-Man adventure story)

Gregory Karp's Living Rich by Spending Smart (Tips on ways to save money. Nothing new to me.)

Alfie Kohn's Feel Bad Education (Progressive essays about education and the mistakes of "Reform")

Amanda Hocking's Switched (The first of a trilogy about trolls)

Jim Krakaur's Three Cups of Deceit (Explains how Mortenson lied in Three Cups of Tea)

Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational (Explains how we don't always make rational decisions.)

Letter to Elected Representatives

Dear Elected Representative:

The entire nation is attacking public education, claiming our schools are failing and that teachers are to blame. Just because something is repeated often enough does not make it true. In fact, as Hitler pointed out, if the lie is big enough, and simple enough, people will believe it.

We do have a crisis in this country, but it is not a crisis of education. It is a crisis of poverty. As I am sure you are aware, our students do very well when compared with other nations when poverty is factored in to the equation. That is, our students who are not living in poverty do just as well, or better, on tests like PISA and TIMMS as do students in other developed countries. However, our students who live in poverty are certainly struggling. The last figures I saw said that nationally over 20% of our students live in poverty. In my own rural community that number is over 50%.

That is our crisis. How can a wealthy and powerful nation have 20% of its children living in poverty? What do we as a nation need to do about this? Do we need to spend millions, or even billions of dollars on more standardized tests? Or do we need to look at the policies that are hurting our children and keeping them in poverty?

No one denies that a good education is a way out of poverty. High paying jobs require an education. But the current unemployment rates cross all education levels. College graduates are unemployed as well as high school dropouts. That shows we have a deeper problem. The poverty problem in our nation is not an education problem, but an economic problem.

If our nation continues to vilify teachers the way it has been, then we really will have a crisis in education. We will no longer have anyone who wants to become a teacher. Why would someone want to enter a profession that is called lazy, lousy, and money grubbing? What evidence do we use to prove that teachers are horrible? The results of standardized tests, which is not a proven way to evaluate teachers. Even if this were a proven method, tests only measure a small slice of what is truly important in education.

Who really benefits from all this testing? Is it the students? After 25 years of teaching I have noticed a disconcerting trend. More and more of my students, both successful and unsuccessful, complain about how much they hate school. They are bored with a curriculum focused mainly on test preparation, and see no personal value to learning anymore.

If the students don't benefit, then someone must. According to Fair Test, “McGraw Hill, (one of the big four testing companies), reported profits of $49 million in 1993 before high stakes testing; in 2004 with contracts in 26 states, profits exceeded $340 million.” And in 2009, K-12 testing overall was estimated to be a $2.7 billion industry. We need to seriously look at a system that benefits corporations at the expense of students.

Please, stand up to the special interest groups that are vilifying education, and take a stand for our students. Stop believing the big lie. Public schools are not the problem, poverty is.

The good, the bad and the ugly

Yes, there are bad teachers in public schools.

Yes, there are mediocre teachers in public schools.

And, yes, there are amazing teachers in public schools.

Here is what no one seems to realize: they are the exact same people.

Every teacher has students who think they are wonderful, and students who think they’re horrible. I have colleagues whose teaching methods appall me, but who have students who love them. I have colleagues who I know are great teachers, but administrators do not like them. I hear parents complain about teachers who are too hard and about teachers who are too easy.

I have taught for 25 years, most of those years in the same small town. I often run into ex-students and their parents in the stores and offices around town. Usually they talk about how they loved my class, or they loved some aspect of my class. But I also have had them make it clear they did not think I was so great. I had one woman who was working in a day-old bread store attack me. She told me she was warning her daughter, who would be at the high school soon, to make sure she never had me for a teacher. I slunk out of that store trying to remember why she hated me so much. The only thing I actually remembered about her was the time she came to class so stoned that the whole class smelled of weed. I had the school resource officer come and escort her out of class. I guess that would indeed make me a horrible teacher.

Everyone talks about getting rid of the bad teachers, but no one can define what a good teacher is. If good teaching means having high test scores, then I know exactly how to go about being a good teacher:

1.     Only teach in middle class schools

2.     Only teach students who have parents who support education

3.     Only teach students who do not have learning disabilities

4.     Only teach students who have no personal problems

5.     Only teach material that will be on the test

If good teaching means reaching as many kids as possible, and helping them to become thinking citizens, then that is a much harder job to describe. We all have different ideas of what it means to reach a kid, or how to go about doing it. We also have different ideas about what thinking means.

What makes a good teacher is as hard to define as what makes a good book. I love books with strong believable characters while my friend prefers books with layers of symbolism. My husband likes science fiction and my neighbor despises that genre. I won't touch a romance novel, and a colleague owns every book written by Danielle Steele.

So give me a definition of a good teacher.  Go ahead, give it a try. Now get twenty other people to agree with that definition. See what I mean? Not so easy, huh?

We are NOT failing

One of the ideas I discuss with my students is that most people assume that others, in the same situation, would react and think in ways similar to themselves.  Thus I have thought for years that those seeking to “reform” education were actually doing it out of a desire to make education better. I no longer believe that. I have come to the reluctant conclusion that the current crop of educational reformers are actually seeking to destroy public education as we know it.

            When I began teaching in 1985, I passionately believed the power of an education rested in its ability to enlighten individuals, to turn them on to the power of ideas. History and literature, my two subjects, opened minds and doors, exposing my students to the entire world of ideas. In 1988 I began teaching journalism as a way to give my students a voice. The value in all of this was profoundly obvious to me. I assumed that was how every one else approached education.

            How wrong I was.

            Another idea I teach my students is that controlling education, and who could get an education, was historically a way to keep populations under control. You do not need to look any further than our own American history to see this in action. Slaves were denied the right to reading and writing because it was easier to keep them from rebelling if they were ignorant. American Indian children were sent to boarding schools to be educated in the white man’s way. Their own language, culture and religions were beaten out of them.

            This control is continuing today. The only difference is the rhetoric surrounding it. Now politicians and the multi-millionaires who control policy use phrases like “educational reform” and “work place readiness.” Education is no longer about opening minds to new ideas, or instilling independent thought.  It is all about providing job skills and preparing students to be productive employees.

            The creative and independent thinking we used to value as a country is no longer valued. Instead we want our children to be competitive with China. The same China whose Cultural Revolution killed millions of intellectuals simply because they were intellectual. Thinking people are dangerous. We can’t have that. Thinking leads to new ideas. Thinking leads to challenges of the status quo. To the people who control that status, thinking is subversive.

            Americans still give lip service to the value of education, which is why the people set on destroying it use the word “reform” and talk about our failing schools. People have heard this phrase so often, that it now becomes a given, reminding me of Adolph Hitler’s famous quote: “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.” Most schools were not failing; at least they weren’t until No Child Left Behind turned them into testing factories. Now we spend so much time testing (one tenth of the school year at my high school) that we no longer have time to teach real thinking. Which reminds me of another quote of Hitler’s, “How fortunate for leaders that men do not think.”

It's just a test

I may be an English teacher, but I have become pretty good at numeracy lately. Let's do some basic math right now.

I spent the half hour right after school today (when I could have been helping students) in a Test Training session. One of the tidbits of information that I gleaned from this training is how much is spent on each student copy of the New Mexico Standards Based Assessment (hereafter referred to as SBA) which is the direct result of No Child Left Behind (hereafter referred to as NCLB or That Insanity).

Each test costs just over $57 ($57.10 to be exact). That made me wonder. How many students take this test, and how much money is pent on this instead of on actual teaching materials. So when I got home, I Googled how many high school students are in New Mexico. Not that easy to find, but the census bureau had some data that I could extrapolate to get the info I wanted.

We have roughly 40,193 juniors in New Mexico (they take the test in high school as juniors). I then multiplied $57 by that number and reached the whopping sum of $2.3 MILLION a year for one test for one grade level. They also take the test in 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th,  7th and 8th grades. That comes out to $16.1 MILLION spent every year on a test. 


SIXTEEN MILLION DOLLARS

At the high school, we also lose six days of instruction to take this test. 6 days are spent checking to see if kids can take a standardized test. Add to that, all of our 9 weeks tests (3 days per 9 weeks, so another 12 days) are really designed to see how kids will do on the SBA.

That means we spend 16 million dollars and one tenth of the school year taking standardized tests.

If people think our education system is defective, that is why. What would you spend $16 million on to help our kids learn more? More computers? More books? More librarians? Smaller schools?