Half of My Students are Failing First Grade

The deadline for grades and academic data is this Tuesday in preparation for Parent-Teacher Conferences after the Thanksgiving break. I'm close enough to finishing all of my spreadsheets to have a pretty good sense of who will officially be on our "watch list" for staying back and doing first grade again next year. And it's half of my class.

I woke up this morning with my brain buzzing and it took me few hours to figure out why I was on the verge of an anxiety attack: my babies are failing and I have no one to blame but myself. I was their Kindergarten teacher, and I thought I was sending them to first grade prepared for more challenging material. If half of them are failing, then I must be failing as a teacher. 

Each family of a "failing" child will receive a letter, which I would categorize as threatening, explaining that they are currently on track to repeat the grade. I will write these letters myself, write goals for each child to guide their families toward helpful intervention at home, and deliver each in a face-to-face meeting. I'm at the point where I feel like such a failure that I cannot imagine teaching another year ever again in my life. 

But there is a caveat. Almost all of my students are on free or reduced lunch. They have wonderful families who work long hours and experience all of the stress of poverty. My students often put themselves to bed. In most cases, I teach the moms, grandmothers, brothers -- anyone who is not at work at night -- how to do the homework so that they can help my student at home because they don't understand the work themselves. Honestly, I remember a similar tension in my own family when my grandmother didn't understand how my second grade math was supposed to be done. Instead she just taught me the way she remembered and then I failed a quiz. We keep reinventing the wheel in education, ahem, Common Core, so things change completely every ten years or so. And families are totally stressed out trying to learn the way that I teach so that they can help with homework. 

I am not saying that I have low expectations for my students. In fact, sometimes I feel like I push them too hard. What I am saying is that not one person in my building is talking about the role that poverty plays in academic achievement. Not one person is willing to acknowledge how much our students lost over the summer. No one wants to hear that the children who are failing are challenged every day by their circumstances because their circumstances are out of our control. All of the unspoken factors that affect our students stay invisible, and teachers are left to bear the guilt, the failure. 

Surprise! Seattle Schools are Crap

When I think of Seattle the first things that come to mind are: wet, Microsoft, progressive. Imagine then, my surprise (horror) this weekend when I had brunch with a fifth grade teacher who told me some very not-progressive anecdotes.

Some of her complaints were your run-of-the-mill urban education roadblocks:

• Large class sizes 
• No professional development
• A lack of community among teachers 
• No supplies
• No technology (Anyone else see the irony?) 
• No support for homeless students and their families

But then a couple of the stories struck me as downright shocking. First, she told me that there was no contingency plan for students who are homeless. Unlike NYC, where "homeless" usually means living in a shelter when you are talking about a student, Seattle's more temperate climate means that families actually set up tents and make their homes in temporary dwellings. I haven't done the research but it sounds like there are fewer programs to support families. Or maybe more families in need. So she says, "Take out your pencil and a pair of scissors!" and half of her class just stares at her. You either spend your own money on the supplies or you don't assign projects that involve cutting.

It gets better (or worse, depending on your sense of humor). Her next-door colleague is teaching in a room that was previously used for special education intervention groups. That means that the room was not outfitted with desks and is quite small. After he was hired this new teacher went to the principal and asked for the desks and chairs he needed. Apparently, teaching in Seattle is like clubbing in NYC: you have to be on The List to get furniture. Unfortunately, this man did not make the cut. So he had to write a grant. For chairs. 

And then the kicker. My new teacher friend came from a low-income school in Madison, WI where every child was given intensive small group and individual attention to ensure that they received plenty of academic enrichment. When she arrived in Seattle with only her car and an entire classroom library squashed in the backseat of said car, she planned to continue this sort of individualized instruction. Teachers call this "guided reading." But get this: her students were so used to sitting in rows and never being asked to interact one-on-one with their teacher that they actually refused. It took her two months to convince them that spending time with her was worth their while. When she went to ask her colleagues for advice they were appalled, "WHY are you wasting your time with groups!?" 

When I looked up recent news articles I found this one which includes an anecdote about a parent donating $70K to a school so that a teacher could stay in their position.... 

So, why is no one talking about Seattle?