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.