Time for testing!

The writing TAKS test is on Wednesday; we had our last writing practice tutorial today, so two more school days and then it's test time. The students have to write a composition as well as pass a multiple-choice grammar/revising section.

I'm pretty sure the kids this year will do better than last year's. Last year I saw 11 of my 22 pass the writing test; this year I have 20 taking the test in English and 1 in Spanish. They won't do any worse than last year, and my hope is 14-15 of the 20 will pass. It's hard to get higher than that with some of them. I can't devote all my class time to writing, since they still need reading and math to stay on pace for those tests (which are at the end of April).

Stanford results (from January) should be back soon. I'm hoping guardedly for better results than last year, but who really knows?

A moment of levity

I love it when my students, who come to me with very low levels of English, say completely unexpected things in English. This happened with my lowest English student the other day. The counselor who visits my class weekly was having the boys and girls lined up in rows. The object of this was that the girls told what the boys did to them, and vice versa, while the listening gender couldn't make any faces--they had to make eye contact and not look away or laugh.

One of the boys failed almost immediately because he was looking at the other side of the room, and the counselor took away a point. At which my low English student (a boy) yelled, in English, "Samuel, how could you do this to our team??" One of those funny moments that makes you happy inside--when you realize that at the beginning of the year, he wouldn't have even been able to say that.

Incentive pay for teachers

Cross-posted at Alex Speaks.

One of the big movements in teaching is “incentive pay.” Now, the rules of rewards are simple: be clear on what is needed to get the reward, be sure everybody agrees that the rules are fair, and be sure the reward is aligned to desired behavior.

The Houston Independent School District has a new “incentive pay” system called “ASPIRE.” This system fails on all three counts. The system is somewhat unclear, nobody can agree that the rules are great, and it does not create what (in my opinion) desired behavior should be.

What does one need to do to get money (up to about $8,000) under ASPIRE? The answer, in short form, is (a) get your students to have high test scores and (b) be at a school that makes overall improvement in test scores. However, the way in which the “value added” to each student is calculated is unknown. HISD students take two tests: the Stanford 10 (for all grade levels), which is a waste of a week of instructional time, and the TAKS, which is the state exam (starting in third grade). Somehow, these scores are put into a formula that derives the “value added” for all students—i.e., evaluating a student based on how the student performs year-to-year, and not comparing grade cohorts to the previous cohort.

Now, “value added” is great as a concept, but there are two significant problems. One is that if students score extremely high, it’s hard to have “value added,” since it’s tough to beat expectations. How is that accounted for in the formula? I have no idea, since I haven’t seen it, and neither has my principal. This was a major problem for my school. We typically score very high, in particular because GT students (gifted-talented) have a magnet program at my school. Our percentage passing went from 93% two years ago to 92% last year (these are very high percentages for HISD). Therefore, we ended up in “Quadrant 4,” which in HISD lingo means that we get $150 per teacher in school bonuses—since we didn’t create more “value added.”

The second problem with “value added” is that there are sometimes changes from year-to-year that aren’t accounted for. The specific change I am referring to is the language of instruction. My students are in their first year of taking their tests in English—last year, they took all assessments in Spanish. Therefore, last year their teacher taught them almost all in Spanish, and this year I have to get them speaking English and passing writing, reading and math tests at a fourth-grade level. Obviously, their scores go down in fourth grade compared to third, because their English is not at a fourth-grade level. This is not accounted for by the ASPIRE system, which expects them to improve at the same rate regardless. Therefore, my behavior is negatively impacted. I got no individual bonus because my students didn’t improve their scores over last year’s—for obvious reasons.

So, there are unclear rules, and the rules are unfair as regards the bilingual program and how exactly “value added” is calculated. But do the rules motivate the right behavior, regardless? That depends on what you think the right behavior should be. Generally, what is desired is (a) more campus cooperation and, as a result, (b) higher test scores. The amount of disagreement about the rules and even the concept of ASPIRE means that (a) is grievously undermined. It doesn’t affect the behavior of the teachers at all and it creates a lot of anger when the bonuses are actually distributed. Our campus felt disregarded when we didn’t get a lot of school money, even when schools which are much worse than ours got far more money just for bringing up very low scores. Really, this means that (b) is not impacted. Is (b)—raising test scores—a worthy goal? Well, that’s a long discussion for another time.

What this shows, I think, is that a system which many people think of as “worthy” (the pay is being funded, I am told, by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) is really the subject of much disagreement and bitterness. “Incentive pay” as a concept for teachers remains a good idea, in theory. But, of course, there have been many other good theories that fail upon execution.

Time goes by...

I know, I know. I haven't posted in a long time. I'm still alive, and still teaching. Everything that's been going on merits quite a long post, and I'm sorry I haven't been updating of late. Believe me, this blog is meant to be as much for me, so that I can remember what this experience was like, as it is for anyone else, and I fully intend to be back on here shortly when I feel ready to start encapsulating everything again.

In the meantime, enjoy the international talk over on the other side.

Open house

More from the "this is the context my kids live in" file:

A kid is drawing swastikas on his arm today. I explained what they are, he seemed to feel really bad, he went to go wash them off.

Open House tonight:
Me: "He was drawing swastikas on his arm... I explained why he couldn't do that and I don't think it will be a problem."
Parent: "That thing he was drawing on his arm? He did that at home too... I didn't realize there was anything wrong with that..."

Begin: Year 2

School starts on Monday. It's hard to believe just over a year has passed since I first welcomed students into my classroom. There's a lot of changes in store for this year.

I like my school, and the fourth-grade team is great this year. We have a new teacher who is really good, and we seem very dedicated to the collaboration/PLC ("Professional Learning Community") model that is being promoted in HISD and at our school. I was elected team leader (somewhat by default due to a lot of circumstances) but I did get us to begin revamping our calendar which we didn't really follow last year. It seems as though we will actually use common assessments this year as well, which should be exciting. I do have 25 students, more than I'd like, but hopefully that will get adjusted.

I have a lot of different plans for this year. I'm going to try doing a real Reading Workshop, with good mini-lessons. I'm going to stress vocabulary, and do a decoding program. I'm teaching grammar differently, and I have math planned out for most of the year as well as a new design for the math block which gives students more time for independent practice and working in teams. I think I'm going to start staying after school with the kids for study hall and to study English and narrative elements in movies.

On the down side, we wasted a bunch of time with horrible professional development. The worst example was the HISD bilingual session. For some reason, they decided to get all the bilingual teachers together at one site. Given the sheer size of our district, that's way too many teachers to have anywhere. The "keynote speaker" was a horrible motivational speaker, whose book had so many typos I had to stop reading despite my boredom. I think she got hired because she's friends with one of the organizers. Parking took 40 minutes and I ended up on the grass by the track (which is made of dirt, by the way). Some people had to park in a shuttle lot and catch a bus. One of the teachers from my school had her car towed because she parked by the dollar store across the street. Of course, it was an HISD session, so I wasn't learning anything either. Plenty of people left as soon as the opportunity arose, and I may have been one of them. Perhaps the "best" moment was when it was announced that HISD's bilingual programs are "working" because there are less 5th grade bilingual teachers than kindergarten teachers! Yay! We push our kids out of bilingual programs! It's working well!!

I've been spending a lot of time with data. It's been fun as I've applied my passion for data to a different field (education). I did discover one particularly motivating fact: the average SAT score at the high school that my students feed into, for 2004-05, was 847. I guess this isn't unusual, but for some reason, that number says a lot more to me than a lot of other facts could.

Well... here goes year 2!

Second language acquisition and NCLB

On Daily Kos, there's a journal about Jim Cummins, the second language acquisition researcher. It's a good summary of the problems of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) for second language learners if you're not familiar with the flaws of that wonderful law.

For those not familiar, Cummins came up with the idea of "BICS" and "CALP"--that there are two basic kinds of language that need to be learned. BICS, or Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills, basically deal with socializing and day-to-day living; CALP, or Cognitive Academic Language Processes, is your "academic speech." The difference is that CALP is used in the classroom without any context. Hence while a student can appear to be fluent, due to acquisition of BICS, their CALP may be far too low to enable any solid academic progress in the second language (English for my students).

NCLB gives a three-year exemption before students are required to be assessed in English for Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). NCLB also removed any references to biliteracy and bilingualism and made the goal of bilingual programs solely to teach English--a good goal, but not enough.

I promise to post more on this soon, as my summer coursework has dealt largely with English language learning issues, and I've learned a lot that's currently churning around in my head.

An anecdote for summer

I've been teaching summer school, which has actually been fun. It's been nice to have a smaller class--and they'll all be in my class next year which is another benefit. We're almost done--it's a short summer school, 4 weeks--and on Wednesday they will be out. Today was a stormy day, and as I drove through the puddles and oceans in third-world east Houston, I could think about the conversation I had with my student earlier today:

9-year-old female student: I went to the park yesterday and saw [Rodrigo] playing soccer. [Rodrigo was absent today].
Me: That's cool. Do you play soccer?
Student: Yeah, I like it. I also saw a robber there. He took stuff from our house.
Me: Oh, okay. [Pause a minute]. What? You said you saw a robber at the park?
Student: Yeah. He escaped from jail.
Me: He escaped from jail, or they let him out?
Student: He escaped.
Me: Shouldn't they go take him back?
Student: Yeah.