Speakout Columns
Hard truth: Our effect on students largely predetermined
Oct 23, 2008 1:29 PM
It’s best to be humble as a teacher because credit and blame are two sides of the same coin.
I realized in my first year that even my best efforts can have limited effects. Back when standardized test grades were expressed as percentiles, there was one boy who went from the 80th percentile in the previous year to the 18th in my class. If any teacher had the power to lower a student’s achievement by that much in one year, he should be studied as a scientific phenomenon. The truth is that personal demons kept this poor boy from even listening, let alone succeeding, in my year with him, a fact not discoverable by the shading of bubbles on an answer sheet.
Then there were what I call my desert-island kids. If you gave them a year’s worth of assignments, deposited them on some desert island and returned for them in June, they would have all lessons, projects and reports completed, showing higher order thinking, with extra credit work and decorated cover sheets. How much credit could I really claim for their improvement?
As for my other students, they ranged, as kids do, somewhere in between the abysmal failures and triumphant successes, and my ability to reach them varied as well.
More than a decade has passed. I have gained experience, technique and classroom management skills. I have become better at seeing what works. Yet nothing has changed my opinion that the degree to which I can affect my students is largely predetermined by the selection of the two-dozen-or-so unique individuals who will occupy my classroom.
This realistic attitude inoculates me against the mental onslaught of the Accountability People who currently reign at the city Department of Education. They insist that all students can and should show increases in their test scores every single year for their entire school careers, whether Johnny’s parents just got divorced, or Shawna’s brother was shot to death, or Patel suffers from chronic asthma or undiagnosed neuroses, or Alan is just so stubbornly resistant that neither the Pied Piper nor the 82nd Airborne Division could get him to lift his chin off his desk.
Here’s how the suits at Tweed think: Little Kyle might be a Level 1 in the 3rd grade, but if he progresses as he should every year, he could be a Level 2 by the 5th grade, a Level 3 by the 7th grade and, by the end of 8th grade, why not a Level 4? The fact that not all our students are getting into Stuyvesant HS is therefore clear evidence of the failure of our profession.
They are so convinced of this theory that if they had their way, they would make teacher evaluations, teacher tenure and teacher pay all contingent on such supposedly inexorable progress.
Why is it that bureaucrats who can understand perfectly well that some students are in need of Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) and lowered thresholds for promotion at the same time believe that every single child in mainstream classrooms is headed for Harvard if only teachers do their jobs? Some children, despite our sincerest efforts and best lesson plans, will never be a Level 4. Some may never even be a Level 3.
And though in our heart of hearts we know it, we tend to keep mum because the Accountability People don’t want to hear our whiny excuses. They applaud former corporate CEO Jack Welch, who famously called for firing the “bottom” 10 percent of a company’s staff each year.
Humility helps me keep my grip on reality. Oh, I’m tempted by the impossible dream. Each year I start out with high hopes and expectations, and I clearly convey them to my class. I let a part of myself be convinced that this year, yes this year, will be the one in which all my students will read and study and understand and excel.
But as the months pass, reality sets in yet again, and I remind myself that I am man and not superman, that my students have independent personalities and free will, and that, in the end, it’s up to them how far or how quickly they progress in my class. Years later, my former students come back to tell me what college they are going to — none to Harvard yet. I can live with that.
Paul Schickler is a teacher and chapter leader at MS 340 in Brooklyn.
