Well, it’s not as if I didn’t know it while it was happening, but it’s now confirmed: last year did not go well. I have official state growth numbers on all my kids, and there’s no way to sugarcoat it: they suck. Indiana breaks kids into three growth categories, conveniently labeled Low Growth, Medium Growth, and High Growth. In the two previous years that the growth model has existed, I’ve had over half of my kids in High Growth and between ten and twenty percent (well, okay, 10% one year and 20% the next) as Low Growth kids. The rest, obviously, were in the middle. These numbers either had me with the best numbers in my building one year or tied for second or third, depending on how you measured, the second year.
Last year I only managed to get a quarter of my kids into the High Growth category, with fully forty-five fucking percent of them low growth. Even if I throw out a few of the kids who I don’t think it’s fair to count against me (in particular, the blind kid who transferred into my class in the third quarter and the handful of kids who spent large chunks of the year in jail or suspended) I’m still probably at a third low growth, which is way too fucking many. I had a brief theory that I was in trouble because I’d jumped up a grade and I was effectively competing against myself; I haven’t formally run the numbers but looking closely convinced me that that was not the case. Some of my highest-growth kids are kids I had two years in a row; some of my lowest-growth kids were kids I only had the one year.
I don’t have data on other teachers to compare myself to because I’m no longer in the same building; for whatever it’s worth, I can also see their language arts scores and by and large my students had better growth in math than LA. However, someone else doing worse doesn’t really make me feel better for having sucked last year. Even my honors kids didn’t really do that great on growth; I feel slightly okay with that because since it was the Algebra class, I didn’t fully concentrate on the 8th grade standards, and I don’t know that I can expect high ISTEP growth when I wasn’t concentrating on ISTEP skills over the course of the year. But that doesn’t exactly make me look better either, although they did quite well on the ECAs at the end of the year, which is something.
The more I think about it, the less interested I am in potentially going back into the classroom after the expiration date on this job runs out. I’m still most of a school year away at minimum (and may be four years away if I get lucky with a couple of things this year) but I still need to start thinking seriously about what is going to come next. Because right now I don’t miss teaching. I just don’t. And I really need to figure out what The Next Thing might be.
I will be in Indianapolis tomorrow and Thursday, speaking of the new job, so it may be quiet around here. I’m hoping to have a Big Thing to announce this weekend, so with a bit of luck I’ll make up for it.
