In which I am terrified

On February 2, 2014February 2, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy9 Comments

simpsons You may have noticed; I’ve talked about it around here as recently as last week: I tend to be a homebody. I used to be a lot more social than I am now, but it takes quite a bit to overcome my societal inertia nowadays. Like… I dunno, a superhero movie. That’s about it.

A couple of weeks ago I committed to being part of a team for a fundraiser trivia night. I did this when “February 1” sounded like it was way off in the future, so far off that I’d never actually live that long. My wife, a bigger fan of trivia than I, also committed. Then we realized on Thursday night that February 1 was in two days and sorta had to scramble for a babysitter. Whoops.

I was at OtherJob all day Saturday, watching shitty weather happening and dealing with a miserably low number of customers. I got a lot of stuff done, but I got no school stuff done at all and so I got home in kind of a crappy mood and in no way interested in mingling with puny humans. The fact that a solid majority of the people we were competing with were going to be strangers made it worse. I don’t do mingling well. I am worse at mingling when in a preexisting bad mood.

My wife made me go. I scowled, but I agreed.

Trivia Night was at the Fraternal Order of Police’s bingo hall. I’d never been in the part of town where it was; easy enough directions, but a lot of looking around for the place we’re going, in the dark and bad-visibility snow.

Oh! Look! A bingo hall. My wife notes that there’s no signage declaring the place to be an FOP.

“There’s no way in hell there’s two bingo halls on the same road,” I say, and we pull in. And we drive past the place. There’s bingo happening inside, and I can’t quite describe why but the place, which was all windows in front, looked like it very well could have been the most depressing building on the planet. I wanted to kill myself just driving past it.

And it was pretty clearly not the FOP. Weird. Well, back on the road.

Two minutes later, we’re driving past a second bingo hall. “This has to be it,” I said, and then we noticed the entire building was dark. So… that’s two bingo halls, on the same road, and neither of them is the one we’re looking for?

Where the hell am I and what the hell is going on? Am I still on Earth? Is it still 2014?

No, the bingo hall we wanted was the third such hall on the same road. We found it. The parking lot was packed, and mostly unplowed. We had to drive entirely around the building and park behind it. There are what looks like millions of people trying to crowd into this place, and my misanthropy has already been well and truly activated.

We walk in. Now, we’re supposed to pay to get in, and the table is registered under the name of one of the members of our group, which makes me think there’s an assigned table for us. We walk in and there’s like fifty tables scattered around, none of them numbered. There’s a woman standing by the door who looks semi-official, but me making eye contact with her just makes her look at me funny, and she doesn’t have any paperwork or anything with her, so we’re… just supposed to look around, I guess? And pay… somebody? Eventually?

Luckily for me our group ended up being by the door; I don’t think I had the heart to search for too long.

Two things become immediately apparent to me: one, I should have taken the “bring a snack” suggestion that I was given much more seriously. There are 45-50 teams of 10 here. These motherfuckers have decked their tables out like goddamn Thanksgiving dinner. They look like they’re tailgating at the Super Bowl. “Snack” does not quite cover it– “each team member will bring enough food to feed thirty people” is slightly more accurate. I spent a moment considering just wandering around the room and seizing food from people’s tables, first to see if they’d even notice, and second to see if they would let me.

Not a joke: one table I walked past several times over the course of the night had six large pizza boxes on the table. For ten people. And there was a lot of other food that was not pizza. Our table, mostly composed of newcomers who had no idea of the, uh, local culture, had a meat and cheese plate, some brownies and a sad-ass bag of Krunchers. And Bek and I hadn’t even brought that.

The second apparent thing: What with judges and employees and bartenders and everything else in addition to the teams there are six hundred people in this place and every single damn one of them is white. Weird fact about me: I am as pasty-complexioned as one can be and I avoid the sun as one avoids the wrath of God, but large groups of white people make me deeply nervous. I spent twenty damn minutes trying to find, at the very least, somebody who looked like they might have had a Hispanic grandparent or, hell, somebody vaguely Jewish-looking, and nope. Nothing. So as soon as these folks get all het up about whatever white Republicans who go to FOP trivia nights like to get het up about, they’re gonna find my ass.

I look under the table to see if there are hoods and robes. No such luck.

Then the PA announcement for, I swear to God, “Ray Lee Ray” to come to the judges’ table, and I had to be physically restrained from fleeing. Nothing good ever happened around anybody who was named Ray twice. And if Ray Lee Ray is running shit then I need to get myself gone, now.

I brace myself for the prayer before the trivia night starts. Amazingly, it doesn’t happen. Which causes me to relax, just a tiny bit.

There’s actually no punch line to this story; once the actual event got rolling and everybody sat down and stopped creeping me out, it was fun and went well. I just did not walk in remotely prepared for what I was going to be greeted by, which is my fault. We got 82 of the 100 questions right, and it probably should have been a little higher– there was at least one question that we would have gotten right if, like an idiot, I had not overlooked the existence of an “all the above” answer, a fact that aggravates me deeply, because I yell at my kids for that kind of shit all the time. That wasn’t a high enough score to place. The wife won a gift basket. And I had a bizarre moment at a urinal that I may save for another post. (How’s that for burying the lede?)

But, yeah: I live in a place where there are three bingo halls within a two-mile stretch of the same damn road. I may need to move.

On how not to say things (by never saying things)

On January 30, 2014January 29, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy13 Comments

6a00e393366a1a8834017616f1e2f9970c This will be my second story this week about someone who did something stupid and fell face first into the Internet as a consequence. Perhaps it’ll become a new thing around here; I dunno. But have you read the bullshit about the yoga idiot yet?

(The article is called “There are No Black People in my Yoga Classes and I’m Suddenly Uncomfortable With It”. No, that’s not a joke. That’s actually what the article is called, and it’s every fucking bit as stupid and clueless as you might be imagining right now.)

The author: a Skinny White Girl. Oh, so skinny, and oh, so white.

The perpetrator: a Non-Skinny Black Woman, who we’re gonna make a whoooooole lot of observations about based on nothing more than making up a bunch of racist nonsense. Read the article, maybe read some of the comments on Gawker, just revel in the stupid because oh my god there is so very much of it.

And lemme tell you a story.

It’s 1998. I have just graduated from college, gone to Israel for a month or two, and then moved to Chicago. I do not start grad school until, God, some unholy late date– September something, maybe, so I manage to find myself a series of temp jobs around the city for something to do and some extra money. 1998, as you may know, involved a horrifying heat wave; my choices were literally go to work or lay around my apartment and sweat all day.

So I got a job. Which meant learning a brand new public transport system in a brand new city, effectively alone, when I’d never actually used public transportation of any kind before.

Something else I’d never done: been a minority. I’d taken some African-American Studies classes at IU, but for some reason those didn’t count, and I was rarely the only white person in the room. Until moving to Chicago, I’d never had the experience of being the only white person I could see unless I was alone.

It took a bit of getting used to.

So, yeah: I’m on a bus. I have no idea where I’m actually going, other than that the bus is eventually going to stop at X street, and that I have to get off there, walk a block, and board a train. Because I have no idea what I’m doing or where I’m going, I sit in the very front of the bus so that I can a) hear the driver as he calls off stops and b) potentially see road signs in case the driver isn’t actually doing that.

Only white person on the bus, for the entire trip. Cue 25 minutes or so of Rosa Parks white liberal anxiety bullshit. Everybody was looking at me. Only white boy on the bus and he’s sitting up in front. He must think he’s better than us. Fucking asshole white boy. Blah blah blah blah blah. I seriously stressed myself out and felt guilty because I was the only white motherfucker on the bus and I was sitting in front of all the black people.

And then I wrote an essay about how bad I felt on the Internet.

Well, no. What actually happened was that I got the fuck over myself and realized that no other asshole on the bus had even noticed I was there, because amazingly enough my white self was not the center of their collective universes. Was it possible that somebody noticed the slightly nervous-looking white kid at the front of the bus? Yeah, but if they did they were probably making fun of me and not aggravated by my existence. And since nobody actually pays attention to anybody else on the bus– hell, if there’s a more “you don’t want none, there won’t be none” place in the world than a public bus, I can’t imagine what it is (edit: it’s an elevator).

Nobody gave a shit. I was not the center of anyone’s world. I was being an idiot. And I got over it.

Bonus, similarly-themed story: I’ve also been the fat person striding into a fitness center, although I was neither black nor female at the time. I’ve even been the fat person striding into the pool, and wondering what everyone else thought of my fat pale mostly-naked body, them with their muscles and their muscles and their zero fat body percentage and their Speedos and their muscles and oh, how dare you, fat person, sully our temple to our perfect bodies with your fat fatness.

Got over that bullshit too.

Here’s what they were thinking: seven more laps, and then I can get the hell out of here and go have a cheeseburger. Nobody gives a fuck about the fat people at the gym or at the pool. If they do, get a new gym. Ain’t nobody paying attention; you are not the center of other people’s lives unless you’re pissing in the pool or sweating all over the machines and not wiping it up.

Errybody get over themselves.

Pfah.

In which I don’t like liking things

On January 3, 2014January 2, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews15 Comments

GWTW_3lg

Consider this a sequel, if you like, to the posts entitled “In which I don’t like things” and “In which I like things“; there will presumably be a post called “In which I like not liking things” at some point in the future, although let’s be honest: given my personality, that could be just about any post. Like, say, this one.

I read the memoirs of former President of the Confederate States of America Jefferson Davis a couple of years ago. It was a hard slog– first of all, because they’re two enormous volumes (volume 1 alone in the edition I linked to is 704 pages, and while that’s not the edition I read, I’d wager that’s 704 pages of small print) and second and more importantly because Jefferson Davis is an inveterate, unrepentant liar. My wife thought it was God damned hilarious; I spent most of a couple of weeks arguing with a dead man before I gave up and hurled one of the damn books across the room and declared I wasn’t pushing any more of Davis’ lying bullshit into my head any longer. It will surprise no one that Davis spends the entirety of his memoirs whining ceaselessly about the big mean bad North and how they were just so mean to the Confederacy and started the war for no reason and blah blah blah God go flee the capital in your wife’s dress again, asshole.

I just finished reading Gone with the Wind… well, today, actually, since I’m writing this on Thursday to autopost Friday morning, but by the time you see this it’ll be yesterday. My mother has championed Gone with the Wind as her favorite book and movie for literally my entire life. I mean no disrespect when I follow that sentence immediately by telling you that my mother doesn’t read much and that her recommendation never managed to put a copy of the book into my hands. (No one really knows where I came from; no one in my family is remotely the reader that I am.) She found out late last year that I planned to read GwtW as part of The List and insisted on buying me a copy. I made it clear that there was no way I was getting to it before 2014, as I was working on hitting 200 and I figured a) it was way too long and b) I was going to hate it and it was going to be a thousand pages of pain.

Gone with the Wind is the second most blatantly racist thing I have ever read in my life; or at least if it isn’t I’m not going to take the time to explore my memory long enough to find counter-examples. It would be first with a bullet if I hadn’t read Davis’ memoirs. It is racist in its characters, its history, its story structure; it is racist in such a way as to make it impossible to believe that Margaret Mitchell was not herself a stone-cold racist and a Southern apologist– and, as the dust jacket on the book tells me she did not discover that the South lost the Civil War until she was ten, I have very little trouble thinking that this might be a controversial declaration.

Here’s the thing, though. (You knew there would be a thing.) First of all, 1924. I kinda expect white people in 1924 to be racist assholes. For the most part they really didn’t have a choice about it back then. (You’ll note I don’t say “she lived in a racist society;” I live in a racist society. That’s a constant. But I have a choice about it in a way that I really can’t say Margaret Mitchell did.)

Here’s the other thing: I should have listened to my mother. Or, at least, my mother should have shoved this book into my hands and locked me in a room fifteen or twenty years ago; I don’t actually remember her insisting that I read the book, although I have vague memories of her making us watch the movie– but that so long ago that other than the line “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” (which is not what he says in the book!) I didn’t remember a single thing about it. Honest truth– there wasn’t a single part of the book that triggered a memory of the movie. I remembered nothing.

Gone with the Wind is fucking amazing. So good, in fact, that I’m mad at myself, because nothing this awful should be this good. The relationship between Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, fucked up as it is, is one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever seen in literature. Hell, Scarlett herself, flawed as she is– and the woman is a supreme asshole– is utterly fascinating. There’s something weirdly proto-feminist about her, almost, and I’m really interested (I haven’t done the legwork on Google yet, but I’m gonna) in seeing what a feminist take on the book looks like. Scarlett is so well-drawn that I almost can forgive the book’s ubiquitous whitewashing/sanitizing of the history of the Confederacy and Reconstruction because, even though I know that shit didn’t happen like Gone with the Wind really, really wants you to, the entire book is told through Scarlett’s eyes– and Scarlett sure as shit would have believed that the South was entirely blameless and that the darkies were all her family (even when she was threatening to whip or skin them, and then only when they deserved it) and didn’t really want to be free and that Reconstruction ushered hordes of illiterate former slaves into office where they picked their toes and took lots of bribes. This is absolutely how Scarlett would have interpreted what actually happened, so the book reports it that way.

(Sidenote: This is much the same phenomenon that I talked about a couple of weeks ago, where there’s no way that–warning, spoilers in the link– Joel’s story from The Last of Us ends any other way than it did.)

Problem is, that’s probably bullshit, and the book drops out of Scarlett’s head every now and again to give what basically amounts to occasional history lessons. This is the reason why I claim that it’s impossible to read the book and not think that Mitchell herself has got to have been a huge racist– because of the impersonal, history-book style the book adopts for a few pages every couple of chapters.

I don’t really like the fact that I liked this book as much as I did. This book contributes directly to– hell, had a hand in creating– a narrative about the South that is literally still poisoning racial and regional relations in this country; the Noble Cause, the Glorious Dead, all that nonsense and rot. In a weird way, it’s almost a point of recommendation– that Gone with the Wind is, historically and politically, awful— and that it still manages to be a wonderful enough novel that I had to tell those other parts of my brain to sit down, shut up, and go away because jesus there’s still 500 pages left and I have reading to do.

I’m gonna stop now; I could say more but the post is long enough already. I may revisit this again later if it turns out that I can actually find some feminist literature on this story and want to talk about it; if you happen to know of anything I should be looking at, let me know in comments.

On boycotts

On November 1, 2013November 1, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Politics, ReadingLeave a comment

I’m writing this at home and in bed; my head has been swimming intermittently for a couple of days now, and I intend to spend as much time as humanly possible right here where I am before dragging my ancient carcass to OtherJob for a few hours tonight– mostly because, unlike RealJob, OtherJob doesn’t pay me if I don’t show up and I need money. But if this happens to get incoherent at some point do be aware that I’m not entirely in my right mind at the moment.

Ender’s Game comes out today. Or… soon? I think it’s today. I won’t be seeing it. Why I won’t be seeing it is an open question, really; I’d like to pretend that it’s because Orson Scott Card is a nasty bigoted asshole but the simple fact is the last movie I actually saw in theaters was… (draws blank)… shit, I know the answer to this… Christ, it wasn’t Iron Man 3, was it?

(Texts wife)

Holy hell, it was Iron Man 3. That’s ridiculous.

If I didn’t have a kid and a job that ate every Friday and Saturday night, I might see more movies– I haven’t seen Gravity or Riddick or the remake of Carrie or just to stick with the Chloe Moretz theme, Kick-Ass 2, and those are movies I want to see. So to say I’m boycotting Ender’s Game probably overstates the case, as I likely wouldn’t have seen it anyway. I want to see the new Thor movie next weekend; we’ll see if I make it or not.

Orson Scott Card doesn’t get any of my money anymore because 1) Orson Scott Card is a major-league asshole and 2) Orson Scott Card has made sure that I find out that he’s a major-league asshole. If he wasn’t a major-league asshole or if he hadn’t made sure that I knew about it, I’d very likely be climbing over things to get to go see his movie this weekend, because I loved the book. He’s on a fairly short list of business or people whose work I have stopped patronizing because of political/moral reasons but otherwise would, along with Dan Simmons, Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, and Chik Fil-A. It doesn’t count if I was never interested in your shit in the first place; I’m not boycotting Rush Limbaugh because I never gave a damn about his show. I know Domino’s Pizza is run by Christianist lunatics; I wasn’t a fan of their pizza anyway so I can’t really pretend that I’m boycotting it now. For all I know, Jack-In-The-Box is run by Satanists, but I can’t boycott their food because there aren’t any of their restaurants near me.

Do I feel like my personal withdrawal of my patronage is making a difference? No, of course not. But it doesn’t have to. I don’t feel the need to drive CFA into bankruptcy; I just don’t want to help them have money any longer. Are there other artists or businesses whose work I do patronize that are as bad or worse than Orson Scott Card? I’m sure there are, which is where the You Don’t Want None, There Won’t Be None policy comes into effect. I don’t have time to submit the author of every book I read or the owners of every business I spend money with to some sort of personal Decency Commission to make sure that every penny I spend only ends up in the hands of Good People. But I feel like if you’re going to go to the trouble to make a stink about what an asshole you are, you probably ought not to whine when said assholery has some consequences.

I’m writing about this because, first, Card’s been in the news lately, for obvious reasons, and second, some of the arguments against not seeing the film (call it “boycotting” if you want) seem pretty intensively infested with stupid. This is manifestly not a free speech issue, for example. I am not the government, for starters, and perhaps more importantly Orson Scott Card is not entitled to my money. There’s always this deeply weird group of people who pop out of the woodwork whenever something like this happens to shriek about how Liberals Don’t Really Respect Free Speech because Look What They Do When They Disagree with People.

If you think that, kill yourself. You’re too fucking stupid to live.

Orson Scott Card is not entitled to my money. Neither is Chik-Fil-A. I will not give them my money based on any goddamn criteria I choose, regardless of the ridiculousness of said criteria, and there isn’t a drop of free speech involved. He has the right to be a public asshole, and I have the right to call him one, and I sure as shined shit have the right to decline to pay the man for his hatred.

On anger and hatred

On July 14, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

I didn’t post yesterday because I was exhausted; I didn’t get home from OtherJob on Friday until after midnight. I didn’t get home from OtherJob until after midnight last night either; it turns out that when we finally get a few days of no-bullshit perfect weather people remember that it’s fun to go outside and do things, and so they do. I’m still exhausted, and my back hurts. Today will not be terribly productive.

I got home to three pieces of bad news, only one of which I’m remotely interested in discussing, and honestly I’m not even going to do that.

Because right now I feel like the first black person– no, the first person– to catch George Zimmerman outdoors and alone after dark should shoot him in the face immediately.

And I cannot trust myself to write when I’m in this state. It’s been almost twelve hours; I’m still here.

Seven or eight years ago, I would have. Seven or eight years ago I was a much angrier person; ironically, I may have lived in a better world then than I do now. Little has gotten better. But I don’t want to write this post, and I don’t trust myself to write this post, so for now, I’m not going to. If that changes, I might.

But probably not.

In which I fix everything (part 3 of 3)

On July 7, 2013August 11, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

standardized-testing

For the last two days I’ve been griping about standardized tests, brought on by this article and Diane Ravitch’s reaction to it. I hope I’ve adequately demonstrated that relying on a pass-no-pass model for determining effectiveness in schools is at least pointless and at most actively destructive. I’ve also talked about the alternative to a pass model, which is a growth model, and offered some criticisms of how growth models, at least as they’re practiced in Indiana, tend to work.

Here, I’ll present an outline of how a growth model for standardized testing ought to work.

First, and most importantly: remove any notion of “passing” and “failing” completely from the testing process. The two most well-known standardized tests in America right now are the SAT and the ACT, the two tests for college readiness, taken by nearly every high school student at some point or another. Even kids who don’t necessarily plan on going to college take at least one of those two tests, and many take both. Have you ever heard of someone “failing” the SAT? No. Because it can’t be done. You can get a terrible score on it, yes, but you can’t fail. Your score is your score. As it stands right now, creating a cutscore for “pass” and “fail” does the following: 1) It makes the test scores easier to manipulate (just change the cutscore and it looks like more kids passed– or that you’ve demonstrated “higher expectations”) 2) it puts an artificial, pointless barrier between kids who barely passed and kids who barely failed (there is no difference between a kid who got a 450 or a 46o; that’s a question or two. It’s I-had-breakfast-and-eight-hours-of-sleep versus I-sorta-have-a-cold-today. But if you put the pass cutscore at 455, it looks like a huge difference. 3) It embeds a shaming mechanism into the test that has no good reason for being there; 4) It creates an incentive for teachers to focus solely on the “bubble kids;” 5) It provides no useful information to anyone that the actual scores did not already provide. There’s no reason for these tests to have a passing score. It is an entirely useless piece of information. I can think of only one exception, which is when districts use test scores as part (PART!!!) of a decision on whether to pass a student from one grade to another. Most districts don’t do that, though, since frequently scores aren’t available until very late in the year– it’s the second week of July already and I don’t know my kids’ scores yet.
Removing the notion of pass/fail from the equation makes it easier to focus on growth as the metric. As I’ve demonstrated already, this means that you can’t exclude any of your kids as “unimportant” to your school’s or your classroom’s end-of-year scores. How a student’s score changes from year to year becomes vastly more important than what their score actually is, which is as it should be. There’s a bunch of ways to do this; Indiana’s model has some good points but is unnecessarily complicated. Here’s my suggestion:
Pick a start year; any start year. Divide those kids into groups based on percentile scores on the test. I like using decile groups (in other words, ten) but you can use quintiles or quartiles or whatever. In Year Two, determine how much those kids moved in their test scores from year one to year two. There are a bunch of ways to quantify this depending on how mathy and technical you want to be about it; the simplest way is to determine movement by thirds. In other words, let’s say the lower third of decile A went from a drop of 140 points to a gain of 10 points, the middle third went from a gain of 11 points to a gain of 90 points, and the top third went from a gain of 91 points to a gain of a million points. You could use standardized deviations from the average or something else if you wanted, but the point is there’s a different standard based on your decile. This means that the kids in the top decile (who don’t have a lot of movement up left for them) can only gain a few points or possibly even lose one or two and still be “high growth,” and kids who start in the low decile and drop anyway would probably be “low growth” kids. This allows some recognition of where the kids started from without looking as random as Indiana’s model does, where a kid who got a 525’s growth model looks wildly different from a kid who got a 526; it should be a bit more predictable as well.
In Year Three, you determine how much they moved from Year Two, and so on.
Kids who transfer into a district aren’t a problem because they should have some sort of score from their previous district, and even if they were taking a different test in their previous district a percentile score on that test should be trivial to establish. They then join whatever decile their percentile score belongs to. If they literally took no standardized tests in their previous district because of their age or their district’s policy on standardized tests, well, the world doesn’t end.
Teachers and schools are evaluated by how many kids they have in the “average growth” and “high growth” categories. Those kids should have been enrolled in the district for a certain minimum number of days (I’d say no less than 75% of the school days up to the test week) and– and this may be controversial– should have been present for a certain minimum number of days as well, and I’d say the absence number should be more stringent than the residence number. I can’t teach a kid who isn’t in school, and I also can’t control whether a kid’s in my classroom or not. Individual districts or states can determine on their own what their requirements for average growth and high growth numbers should be.

One disadvantage of this is that it does make it more difficult to present school data to the public in an easy-to-understand, useful format. One big advantage of the pass rate is that parents understand it; moving from 50% pass to 52% pass has a clear meaning, while we’d have to present averages and medians and all sorts of other data to make the new model understandable when we’re comparing schools. That said, if you want a “one number” comparison, providing the sum of the “high growth” and the “average growth” kids would do nicely; giving all three, combined with averages and medians of actual scores, would provide sufficient information, and anybody who wants to dig deeper (provide numbers per decile, too, maybe) is welcome to.

It’s not great– we’re still paying too much attention to standardized test scores– but it’s certainly better than what we’re doing now. Feel free to comment (Please! Comment!) with suggestions and questions.

Be prepared, by the way, for me to find something utterly irrelevant to gripe about tomorrow.

On “high expectations” (part 2 of 3)

On July 6, 2013August 11, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

3pg00d Yesterday I talked about some of the problems that we run into when we try and use standardized test scores as a measure of student, teacher, or school progress. One of the ideas that always comes up when we talk about this is that we should have “high standards” and “high expectations” for our students, and that when we acknowledge that some people aren’t starting the race at the same place as others we’re somehow not properly Standarding and Expecting things of them.

Sounds good, right? High is better than low! Standards and Expecting Things are good, too! So we should definitely have High Standards and High Expectations.

Well, great. Sure.

What’s that mean?

No, really. I’ll wait.

And there’s the problem, see. You aren’t really saying much of anything useful when you say you have High Expectations and High Standards, and you run the risk of saying something incoherent if you’re not careful.

Let’s address high standards first. “Standard” has a pretty specific meaning in the education world. The Common Core is a set of standards; most states still have their own, as the Core isn’t completely phased in yet across much of the country (and is a subject of no small amount of controversy on its own, I should point out). To say that we should have High Standards is basically just saying that we should be teaching kids material that challenges them to some extent or another and (usually) what the speaker actually means is that kids nowadays should be learning either the exact same stuff they learned in that grade or something more complicated.

You can argue the merits of individual sets of standards; I happen to believe that, at least in sixth grade math, Indiana’s standards are pretty solid, and while I have a quibble or two with how the Common Core handles things I don’t have much of an argument with it. Just tell me what to teach; I’ll get the job done. What we don’t have, in any state or jurisdiction or locality that I’m aware of, is any situation where the standards are different for black students or white students or girls or ELL kids or anybody else. Standards are standards; they’re out there and they’re not disaggregated at all.

So what we’re really talking about here is what we expect from our kids.

And for expectations to be meaningful, they have to be specific. You can say that you expect everyone to do well. Great! Also pointless. Heck, you can expect anything you want. I can expect that my students will bring me cookies and milk every day and hurl a virgin sacrifice into the smoking maw of a nearby volcano for me once a month, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.

Lemme say it again: expectations must be specific to specific students in order to be meaningful.

A few examples, all based on real kids I had last year: Velma had the highest math score in the fifth grade before landing in my room. Velma, frankly, doesn’t have a lot of room for growth. She was already pretty close to getting as high a score as scores can get.

I told her she’d gotten the highest score in the fifth grade. She was excited and proud.

“I expect the highest score in the school this year, y’know,” I said. Which, honestly, was asking her for maybe a ten-point bump in her score. In all seriousness, my challenge with Velma last year was to keep her realistic. I haven’t seen her ISTEP score for sixth grade yet, because reasons, but when you start off with a score as high as hers is and there’s an upward limit to how well she can do, the simple fact of the matter is no matter how good a teacher I am her score is likely to drop. Demanding perfection from her would have been stupid. It would have stressed her out and stressing her out would not have helped her performance. I used the “best score in the school” line once or twice over the course of the year, mostly to hassle her, but short of a nosedive there’s not much she could have done to disappoint me with her score. She’s a great kid and I know she did her best.

“Do your best!” sounds like weasel language, doesn’t it? That’s not high expectations! Should I have ridden the kid like a donkey all year about driving her enemies before her and hearing the lamentations of their women to avoid the “lacks high expectations” canard? No, of course not; screw that. Expecting a kid to do his or her best is really all you need to do if you have a kid who actually will do their best, and there was never any risk of Velma giving me less than 100%.

Fred, on the other hand, had the lowest math score in the fifth grade. His math score was seriously a hundred points lower than the second-lowest kid I had. It was so low that I was seriously wondering whether he got off by a number or something and had managed to answer every question on the wrong line.

Early on in the year, Fred’s mother requested a parent/teacher conference with me and asked me flat-out if I thought he was going to pass ISTEP with me as his teacher. And I told her that there was basically no chance whatsoever of that happening. I more or less guaranteed her that her son was going to fail again. He was just too damn far behind; too far to catch him up to grade level in a single year barring a miracle or him moving into my damn house.

And then I told her that I wanted to see a higher point gain from Fred than any other kid I taught this year, and spent about fifteen minutes explaining exactly how we were going to do it, and then worked my ass off all year keeping him as close to on-track as I possibly could. And now, eight or nine months later, there’s maybe one kid out of the fiftysome I had last year whose score I want to see more than I want to see Fred’s. I bet I got a 200 point gain out of the kid– not remotely enough to get him to pass, mind you, but about 166% of the score he got last year.

And now there’s Daphne. Daphne missed passing the ISTEP in fifth grade by something like five points, basically a single question. I looked her mother in the eye on Open House night, which is before school even starts, and guaranteed her that her kid was going to pass ISTEP this year. Dumb? Yeah, probably, but I was in a grand mood. Daphne spent the year ricocheting from one emotional crisis to another; I caught her cutting herself on two separate occasions (note that I’m the one doing this, not her parents,) rarely turning any work in, etcetera. Daphne had a terrible year– but a terrible year that had basically nothing to do with her math class or her math teacher. Do I expect Daphne to have made strides in my math class when Daphne probably did well by keeping herself out of a mental hospital over the course of the year? Of course not. I’d like to see that she made some improvement and, honestly, I suspect she did– she didn’t turn in any work, which meant she spent most of the year failing all of my classes (and that’s a discussion for another time) but she seemed pretty on the ball whenever I was assessing her on anything other than turned-in assignments. But her ISTEP score? I really don’t care anymore. Staying the same is just fine.

You tell me: which kid do I have higher expectations for? Which kid is going to make me look better when and if our test scores get reported solely on pass rates? And, again, notice: for Fred and Velma, the answer is neither. One kid failed and will fail again; one kid passed and will pass again. Neither of them is going to move my numbers at all if we’re using a pass-rate-only evaluation of our test scores. Daphne is a perfect example of a bubble kid (and, I can’t make this clearer: all three of these kids are real) and so my skills as a teacher and my building’s probation status are going to depend on whether one kid who takes one test on one day spent the night before using erasers to scar her own arms or not.

This is unacceptable.

The pass model fails because it does not encourage high expectations. It encourages a narrow focus on a narrow band of kids who can be motivated, bribed, pushed or dragged across that line. And if the state doesn’t particularly like their pass numbers from a test, all they have to do is manipulate the cutscore and– voila!– we had more kids pass than we did last year! We’re Doing Things over here! I am certain that Illinois did this while I am teaching there; I had kids pass the ISAT my second year in Chicago who had absolutely no business “passing” anything at all, and the state and CPS crowed and crowed about our pass numbers. They manipulated the test scores; while I’m not going to go so far as to claim that I didn’t teach my own kids anything, what they did learn from me had precious little to do with their test scores at the end of the year.

I hoped that one of my kids didn’t fall by too much, that one kid failed, and that a third kid just didn’t crater. And I maintain that all three of those things represent “high expectations.”

Any chance of me convincing anyone of that without 1658 words of explanations?

Tomorrow: A method that I think might actually work.

In which this isn’t quite what it looks like (part 1 of 3)

On July 5, 2013August 11, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching4 Comments

What the hell, let’s get in trouble.

Go take a look at this article first, and then Diane Ravitch’s reaction to the article.

What, you didn’t read? Okay, I’ll summarize. Alabama thinks this is OK and Diane’s mad; the slightly ungrammatical intro is a quote:

These are the percentages of third-graders expected to pass math in their subgroups for 2013 are:
– 93.6 percent of Asian/Pacific Islander students.
– 91.5 percent of white students.
– 90.3 percent of American Indian students.
– 89.4 percent of multiracial students.
– 85.5 percent of Hispanic students.
– 82.6 percent of students in poverty.
– 79.6 percent of English language-learner students.
– 79 percent of black students.
– 61.7 percent of special needs students.

I can hear your brain, you know. “What?” you’re thinking. “That’s terrible! How dare they set lower standards for everybody other than Asians and whites! That’s racist!”

She’s hollering and yelling about it and so is everybody in her comments (most of ’em, anyway) and I barely had the strength to wade through a third of the comments on the original article.

Let that idea simmer a little bit; I’m sympathetic, believe me. I’m gonna change the subject for a bit but I’ll get back around to this.

Let’s assume that, as we do at the moment, you believe that standardized tests of some kind are a good way to assess student learning. For the moment, I’m not going to debate whether that’s actually true or not; let’s just mutually decide that we think they do. It’s good enough. If you care about standardized test scores, there’s a couple of different ways to pay attention to how schools/classrooms/teachers/kids/whatever do on them. The first, which is the method No Child Left Behind followed for a decade or so, is the raw pass rate, and I think the pass rate is the number that most people are accustomed to wanting to look at. You just calculate how many kids passed out of how many kids took the test, and you’re done. One number, easy to compare to other numbers. It’s great!

If you tell a school, or a district, or whatever, that they’re going to be judged solely on how many kids manage to pass Test X, here is what’s going to happen: the “bubble kids” suddenly become the most important students in the building. Billy, over there, has parents who made sure he was reading before he entered preschool. His house has thousands of books in it, his parents both have graduate degrees, and he had the highest test score in your school last year.

You are not going to pay any attention to Billy. Billy’s going to pass unless you blind him before he takes the test.

Shirley, on the other hand, is the product of a single-parent home and has an array of learning disabilities. The only book in her house is the Bible, and no one in the house can read it. Her mother has been unemployed for eight months and did not graduate high school. Shirley currently lives with her mother, her aunt, and the six other children they have between them and their home situation is at best wildly unstable. She struggles mightily with material four or five grade levels below her age.

Screw Shirley, too. It doesn’t matter how much effort you put into her; she’s not gonna pass no matter what you do unless you take the test for her.

The kid you’re looking at is William. William’s pretty bright, usually, but how well he does depends on his mood. If he’s paying attention, and if he’s taken his meds, he can be a good student. He struggles, and needs additional help, but he generally isn’t the type to just give up on you; he’s a hard worker if he thinks you like him. He didn’t pass last year, but he was close.

Your Williams are now the most important kids in your classroom. Those kids– and they can be a large chunk of your room depending on what kind of school you teach at– are going to determine whether you pass or fail, or whether your school stays afloat or goes on probation. You’re going to spend the lion’s share of your energy on the kids who have a chance to pass the test but aren’t guaranteed to pass the test. The rest of them are what they are; one way or another, it’s a waste of energy.

Sad but true fact: Billy is more likely (but not guaranteed) to be white or Asian, and Shirley is more likely (but again, not guaranteed) to be black or Hispanic. William is a little more blended but he’s a bit more likely to be some shade of brown than otherwise. The so-called “achievement gap” is so pervasive in American schools that I’m not going to waste the breath on talking about it beyond this sentence. It exists. It sucks that it’s real, but it is.

If you focus on pass-only as your measurement method, you’re going to get schools and teachers who focus solely on the middle rather than the top or the bottom. Kids who can’t be moved from fail to pass, or who won’t move from pass to fail, are a poor use of effort. You’ve got to get each and every one of those bubble kids because we have to show “improvement” on our grade’s numbers from last year, even though these aren’t the same kids we were measuring last year, they just happen to be the same age as those kids were.

This, obviously (I hope) makes no goddamn sense at all.

Here’s a better way: pay little or no attention to pass rates, and instead focus on improvement. Okay, it’s nice that Billy passed. Did he do better this year than he did last year? By how much? If the answer is “yes,” you’re doing a good job. If the answer is “no,” there’s a problem. If you have a bunch of Billys and they all did worse than they did last year, you have a real problem.

Shirley? We’re not so worried about whether Shirley passes right now. Shirley entered sixth grade reading at a first-grade level. If you moved Shirley up to third grade in a single school year, you did a good job. Same as William– his score was 40 points higher than he did last year, but the pass cutscore moved up by 45 points. He still didn’t pass, but he did better than he did last year. He showed improvement. This is a good thing.

It is also hideously complicated, and that hideous complication is why we tend to focus on pass rates instead, even though focusing on pass rates is stupid. Pass rates aren’t complicated and they aren’t hard to explain. Indiana, in particular, uses the improvement method, technically called a “growth model.” Every kid that takes the ISTEP is compared to every other kid who got the same score they got last year, and then they’re ranked as either a High Growth, Average Growth, or Low Growth kid. The problem is that sometimes you’ll get some random-ass score that not many people got and a “high growth” score is a point. Or– and I saw this happen– some kids will lose points and still be High Growth, and other kids will gain immense amounts of points but because everyone who got a 512 last year ate their Wheaties before the test this year, that will somehow count as Low or Average growth.

It’s still better. Indiana’s model has stupidities embedded in it– those kids I talk about in the last paragraph are not hypothetical– but it’s still better than relying on pass rates, because every kid’s scores count. I don’t want to just focus on my bubble kids. I want to focus on everybody, because Shirley having a bad year hurts me just as much as William or Billy. When we get down to the nitty-gritty details of who’s High Growth and who’s Low Growth I might find some places to quibble, but as an educator I can’t afford to prioritize one group of students over another.

And that’s a good thing. We want that.

Back to NCLB for a minute. One of the bigger pains in the ass of NCLB was the way it disaggregated groups of kids into subgroups. Not only did your school have to pass a certain percentage of its kids to stay in good standing, but a certain percentage of your black kids and a certain percentage of your ELL kids and a certain percentage of your special ed kids and a certain percentage of your girls and a certain percentage of your blah blah blah blah blah all had to meet Adequate Yearly Progress goals. If just one of your subgroups– and these damn things could be on the level of a single family in a smaller school– was out of compliance, the whole school was. God help you if you had a diverse student body. Somebody was bound to mess up; you were screwed. It made being in a basically segregated school a good thing. If everybody was black (and my school in Chicago was) then you didn’t have to worry about eight different racial subpopulations screwing your numbers up because the Garcias or the Nguyens just got here last year and their kids don’t speak English well enough to pass the test yet. Or because your school has a reputation for having a great special ed department, so you have lots of special ed students because parents fight to get their kids in your school– which means when that large group of special ed students don’t make AYP, your whole building is labeled “failing” because of the very thing that made your building successful.

It sucked, mightily.

What we’re seeing, up there, in that looks-really-racist chart, is a combination of a growth method and NCLB’s disaggregated student populations. They’re acknowledging that the achievement gap exists. We cannot simply state that we want 80% of everybody to pass (to pick a number at random) because it’s unrealistic for all of our groups of kids. Instead, what we want to see is for everyone to make improvement. Well, to improve, our Asian kids have to hit a 93.6% pass rate. Our black kids aren’t passing at the rates that the Asian kids are. We still want improvement from them, but for that group, a 79% pass rate represents improvement. We’re still trying to bring up all of our kids; we’re just realistic about how much we might be able to bring them up from year to year.

Of course, when you present it that way, without– at the moment– 1764 words that no one will read of explanation first, you look racist as hell. And it was a terrible mistake for the state of Alabama to release these numbers like this. But it was a political mistake, not a pedagogical one.

Tomorrow– because this is already too long– I’m going to talk about what it actually means to have “high standards” and “high expectations” and how it works with this type of model.

Unless, of course, I come up with something more interesting.