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Educating Children: “The hard is what makes it great”

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Jimmy Duggan is talking to Dottie Hinson in “A League of Their Own” about her decision to leave baseball.  She tells Jimmy that playing “… baseball just got too hard”.  His answer is about baseball and a whole lot more.  “It’s supposed to be hard.  If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it.  The hard is what makes it great.”  We apply this insight to the teaching and learning of children in the 2021-22 school year.

What do we know?

No teacher, school leader, or school board member working today has experienced the type of challenges we all face in opening the 21-22 school year.  We have no prior experience to tell us what to do.  After more than a school year in various stages of campus closures, remote instruction, daily screen time interactions, and still within a national pandemic, there is an expectation that we can create normalcy in September.  To add icing to this dire circumstance, principals and teachers have little to no accurate data regarding student learning in the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years.  Hard is an understatement.

The status of student learning is confusing.  Some children were in-person students last spring.  Some children were remote learners last spring.  Some remote learners dropped in and out of active learning; their reasons were many and varied.  Some children were home schooled.  Some children enrolled in out-of-community schools that provided in-person learning and now return to their local school.  Some children were provided district curriculum in 20-21 and others were provided vendor or on-line curriculum.  A classroom in September will be a menagerie.

Statewide assessments in 20-21 were waived.  School assessments in 20-21 were hit and miss.  Data is not consistent across groups of children.  Data is not complete for an individual child.

School faculty and leadership changed.  The pandemic chased some out of teaching and greener pastures called others to new school employment.

As a generalization, children with learning challenges received attention and accommodations in 20-21 but not the same level of attention and accommodation required to make the annual progress they needed.

Why is this thus?

The 20-21 school year was about organizational survival.  In terms of time on educational issues, we spent more energy and resources in 20-21 arguing about remote versus in-person instruction, masking versus non-masking, inequities in Internet access, and our believing in or not believing in health data and experts than we spent on discussions of clinical teaching and learning.

As evidence, more than 95% of the public communication with our local school board were arguments about remote/in-person, masking and social distancing, and the cancellation or limited scheduling of athletic events.  Less that 5% of communication was about quality teaching and children.  The delivery of school lunches to children at home was a more heated topic that reading and writing. 

As evidence, we locally spent more than one million dollars on pandemic infrastructure, especially HVAC and technology.  The good news is that no children or school staff in our local school suffered serious illness and all teachers and children were provided with up-to-date personal devices.  Strangely, we spent oodles of money on how to distance ourselves from person-to-person contact when education innately prospers with close human and intellectual activity.

As evidence, as we begin the 21-22 school year, we still are in arguing mode.  More school board meeting time and administrative attention is committed to resolving parent issues with masking and the status of the unvaccinated than is devoted to curricular and instructional readiness.  Our local Board received more than 100 communications about masking and only two about our K-2 reading programs.

What to do!

Teaching and school leadership in 21-22 will be “hard”.  Although we are not out of the pandemic grind and distraction, we cannot lose 21-22 to the pandemic disruption.  We are ready for and need a good and productive school year of academics, activities, arts, and athletics.  It will not be easy, but the rewards are available.

Instructional expertise is now at a premium.  There are fewer teachers available to teach due to the pandemic and a prior lack of enrollment in teacher prep programs.  21-22 is a year for instructional expertise to be prized and a full-court press mounted through professional development to build more expertise.  These are clinical instructional and human relations skills.  Principals and teachers will be hard-pressed to lead and to accomplish this in-service training on top of necessary daily work, but expert work is required not a wish.

We need to support classroom teachers in “normalizing” curricular instruction.  Masks or no masks, in 21-22 our teachers need to assess each child’s readiness for this year’s curricular objectives.  And, more importantly, instruct or remediate areas of learning which were missed or less successfully taught last year.  21-22 will be a hard year of work to get children and curricular goals back on track.  Constant encouragement and recognition of achievement will be required.

We need to support classroom teachers with conversations about daily assignments not classroom conditions.  The conditions will change during the school year.  Arguments about masks in August may not be relevant in October or November.  Focus on the year not on the day; on the pathway to significant student learning not on the distractions of the moment.  It is hard to move beyond the immediacy of conditions we do not like, but this movement is required if 21-22 is to be more than 20-21.

Understand that some instruction may seem like “yesterday’s” or “last year’s”.  It is.  Back-building learning is necessary bring each child individually up to speed with 21-22 learning goals.  Developing student proficiencies over such a wide spread of curricular goals will be hard; it is necessary to prepare children for 22-23.

The Big Duh!

Although Jimmy Duggan was not always an empathetic coach of the Rockford Peaches, he knew the game and that playing championship-level baseball was hard – “… the hard is what makes it great”.  The scramble to cause children to learn in 21-22 will be monumental for everyone in school.  Each staff member, including maintenance, food service, transportation, and not just instructional faculty, plays a role in transitioning school back to in-person teaching and learning, in-person school athletics, activities, and arts, and being a whole school once again.  Some pandemic protocols will remain in place and evolve during the school year as community viral conditions change.  The fall of the year will not be like the spring.  A graphing of what we need to do in 21-22 is a steep uphill slope; a hard climb.  At the top of the graphing, we will look toward 22-23 and a school more like what we knew and want again. 

We have hard work to do.

Schooling As A Long View: A Best Perspective

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“Matter” is not just a politically expedient term in the 2020s, it is a highly functional term.  “Matter”, as a verb, implies an essential importance or value.  When the word is used properly, it denotes a prioritization of what matters over what does not matter.  We need to set this aright.  Try this out – education matters, annual assessments do not matter.

The blame game of school assessment and accountability is messy because we all in are in the soup of the problem of making something that does not matter matter.  This includes all educators and educational leaders.  I am writing of the obsession with annual assessments of student achievement of selected academic skills that kicked into high gear with No Child Left Behind and continues twenty-plus years later. 

What Do We Know?

We march to the tune of federal and state mandates.  Each provides us with requirements to assess annually all enrolled children regarding their proficiency in English/Language Arts (reading) and mathematics.  Further, government publicly posts these assessment scores, along with graduation and promotion rates, and daily average attendance, as measures of school quality for the purpose of community accountability and parent choice of school enrollment. 

A person who believes that this narrow and myopic perspective of school quality is what really matters is not concerned with education but with some other nefarious agenda.

Education, not incremental learning, cannot be measured on an annual basis.  And, the education that we want for our children, one that is rich in academic, activities, arts, and athletics, cannot be measured and conveyed by the boiled down, single score that is used today to connote educational quality in a school or school district.  On the latest State Report Card, our local school is represented with a 79.6 – Exceeds Expectations.  The word “meaningless” is spoiled when used to describe this attribution of educational quality.  79.6 is not about education, it is about politicized ranking.  Contradictions abound in our soup.

Schools in Wisconsin are prescribed by statute and DPI rule to provide each child with instruction in a long list of curricular and topical subjects.  Statutory high school graduation requirements prescribe credits in math, science, ELA, social studies, physical education, health, and a successful civics examination.  And, the “state superintendent encourages school boards to require an additional 8.5 credits selected from any combination of vocational education, foreign languages, fine arts, and other courses,” per WI Stats s. 118.33(1)(am).  The legislature piles on with favored, special topics, such as personal finance, tribal history and sovereignty in Wisconsin, and calendared days for venerated Wisconsinites.

What, then, is a quality education?  Certainly, the requirements of our state cannot be ascertained on a two-subject annual assessment.  It is folly and absurd to connect and label a school’s quality using this politically-devised scoring mechanism.

Rather, take the long view.  As a result of multi-subject instruction and school experiences, what does a child know, what can a child, how does a child resolve significant problems, how does a child cooperate and collaborate with others, and what does a child value from their learning at the point of graduation?  Or, at the transition from one level of education to the next – elementary to middle school to high school, or primary to intermediate to secondary levels of education.

Why Is This Thus?

Education, like soup, is not something you throw in a pot, turn on to heat, wait ten minutes, and eat as as a consummate meal.  Education requires time for elements of various curricular ingredients to mingle, for initial trial and error, for correction, for additional instruction to refine understandings and skills, for enrichment and extended applications, and for personal acknowledgement of what has been learned.  Children do not become proficient readers, trumpet players, computer coders, throwers of ceramic pots, or solvers of physics problems in single year increments.  Or, in two- or three-year increments.  Education of important learning takes time.

It is school fact that some children can meet a school goal immediately and other children require significantly more time.  Some children seem to learn innately while others learn by grinding through their assignments.  At the end of the day, educational quality is when all children have learned and are proficient in displaying their learning.  Current assessment systems reward schools based upon the enrollment and achievement of their innate learners.

The quality of an education is dependent upon each child’s wants and needs.  When the school bus arrives in the morning, some children run to the gym or playground drawn by sports and athletics, some run to the music rooms and art studios drawn by artistic interests, others run to their classrooms drawn by individual academic interests, some to the school shops, and still others to hallways and school commons where their social interests are met.  We can find children who excel in the arts yet stumble on the required ELA and math assessments and today we label them as “not meeting expectations”.  We find children whose first language is not English making tremendous gains in English-dominant academic classes yet disaggregate their low assessment scores.  We should be celebrating each child’s personal growth and attainment of our many curricular goals as displays of educational quality.

Our current valuation of educational quality creates divisive strata within our faculty.  Teachers of ELA and math matter because their curricula are measured.  Teachers of all subjects not measured do not matter, or not as much.  Further, we insult non-ELA and non-math teachers by insisting they find and use strategies that fortify student ELA and math growth.  Then, we give lip service when asking ELA and math teachers to support student learning in what doesn’t “matter”. 

To Do!

As the saying goes, “Say what you mean and mean what you say”.  If in your school only annual ELA and math proficiencies matter, say this on your web site and above the entrance doors of your school.  And, post your annual state-issued school report card scores as if Moses carried them down a nearby hill.  If test scores matter, refer to your excellence as snapshots only.

If, in your school, education matters, take the long view.  On your web site and above your doors declare the importance of all instruction and student learning over time.  Post scores of multi-year growth toward proficiency in academics, activities, arts, and athletics.  If education matters, place your emphasis on learning over time that matters, refer to your excellence as enduring education.

School Is Where Children Grow Up: Education Is How They Grow Up

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Children grow up.  As K-12 educators, we know them well in increments, sometimes a school year only and sometimes as elementary, middle or high school students.  Then, they graduate and we lose track of most.  Who they were and who they become are influenced by how we interacted with them while they were ours and by how they react to what and how we taught them.  We are not responsible for everything in their young adult lives, but now and again they let us see our work and its effects.  I am amazed by so many when I see them in latter years.  They are full-grown and in the world we believe we prepared them to occupy and I smile at their stories.

I turn wood on a lathe and create useable personal and home craft products.  At a recent craft fair a young man and young woman were examining an ebony-handled razor and shaving brush set.  They stood on the other side of my display table under a red-topped canopy.  There were a dozen folks looking at my work and whenever anyone picks up an item, I engage with them and tell them about the wood or how the item was crafted.

“The razor handle is turned in ebony”, I said over the display table.  “Ebony is grown in equatorial Africa and turns into a very smooth and durable handle for razors and brushes”.  The young man manipulated the razor in his hand looking at the young woman and mimicking his shaving.

“You don’t remember me, do you”, he said turning to me while examining the accompanying shaving brush handle.

This is not a foreign question for a retired teacher, coach, principal, school superintendent.  I have known thousands of children.  As young adults, some are exact replicas of their former teen-age selves.  Others are not.  I could not name him.

Still holding the razor and brush, he told the young woman, “I was trouble when I was in school.”  She smiled and said, “Nothing new there.”

“Help me”, I said.  “You are grown and I cannot place the face or voice.” 

“Shane (I will omit the last name)”.

I immediately knew his story from Kindergarten through his graduation.  “I am pleased to see you again”, I said and held out my hand and we shook.  I was also pleased by his firm grip and willingness to shake.  These two facts told me about his memory of his studenthood – he was equally pleased to see again.

I turned to the young woman and said, “I explain to every person accompanying a former student that I knew your friend when he was a student.  I always say, with hand flourishes, ‘He was a stellar student, a fine athlete, courteous to his teachers, and a good friend to his classmates.’”  She smiled a look of understanding yet knowing better.

Looking at Shane, I told her “Shane grew quickly in elementary school.  He was big for his age and wanted to be big among all the other boys, but some things got in his way.  One was temper.  The other was independence.  He did not like being told ‘No’.  This obstinance also put him on the wrong side of some teachers and he spent time out of the classroom.  As his principal, I knew him fairly well.  A little of his home life influenced his need to be loud and defiant in school and we did not fault him for that.”

“Shane was athletic but did not like sports.  Cooperation was not his thing.  He was school smart, talented in music.  He was inquisitive.  In middle school, he was ‘all boy’ and got into the usual mischief.  In high school, Shane showed a real attachment to teachers who took a personal interest in him.  His principal did.  His music teacher and his computer science teacher, also.  Like many high school students, Shane did well in subjects he liked and skated through those he did not.  He graduated.  And, I have not seen him since shaking his hand at graduation.”

Turning to Shane, I asked, “Bring me up to date.  What are you doing back in this area?  Where have you been and what are your plans?”

He explained that he graduated from college, majored in computer science, was employed with a software company that, due to the pandemic, allowed him to work from anywhere.  He and his girl friend were renting-to-buy a home several miles from his former school and they intended to make this their home.  Not surprisingly, Shane did not introduce her, so I introduced myself and welcomed her to the community.

Shane was tall, well-built, looked healthy, and stood straight.  He looked me in the eye when we spoke with each other.  He had learned professional skills and was gainfully employed with plans for a future. 

I rounded the displayed tables to stand next to him saying, “I am so pleased to see you today.  I am pleased that you looked at my woodwork.  And, I am most pleased that you told me your story.”  He did not make a purchase, but took a business card and smiled as he and his girl friend walked on.

School is where children grow up.  They give us thirteen years of their life and the opportunity to teach them.  School is all about preparation; it is not an end.  Education is how children use what they have learned, some learning from school and some from life, to become adults in the world. 

We see many Shanes in our work.  It is easy to characterize them early in life by their school successes and failures, behaviors and misbehaviors, and how they seem to conform to our pre-conceptions of what and who they should be.  School is a little like lathe work.  A block of wood goes between the head- and tailstock, we give it a turn, apply a chisel, and begin to imagine a finished product.  It is only an imagining, though.  I never know the true grain inside a block of wood until it is exposed.  Almost always, it is a natural work of art.  I also never know, once it is purchased, if an ebony-handled razor and brush will become part of an owner’s daily practice, how long he or she may use it, or what will happen in its future.  I only know that it was well-turned, prepared and finished for long service, and ready for the world. 

I liked Shane as a student and hope to know him as an adult in our community.  He is still turning out.

Reading Wars Redux – A Good Fight

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We are a contentious lot – people in general, that is.  It is not that people like to fight, I hope, but that they will rise to the occasion.  There are many arguments in the realm of public education and the pandemic fueled these and bred even more.  I write this morning about one that has history, many bouts, and still rages. It is a good and worthy engagement in public education measured by the distance between the opposing forces and the significant differences in outcomes should one side prevail.  This is the Reading Wars Saga Redux.

A reader may snub this this post believing that the Reading Wars are old news, a story that is put to rest.  But, it is not.  Three key points make the Reading Wars more than relevant today.  They are:

  • In the absence of daily in-person reading instruction during the pandemic, we need the most effective and efficient reading strategy to cause all children to be proficient readers.  This is more that compensatory, because children in K-3 who missed 30 months of direct reading instruction are in danger of a lifetime of ineffective language acquisition skills and reading behavior.
  • Public education sermonizes the need for all children to be well-educated, yet categorizes a percentage of children as learning challenged.  The achievement gap between non-categorized and categorized children is clearly demonstrated in their reading proficiency.  A strategy that will cause categorized children to acquire language and read and write with equivalency to non-categorized children compels us to consider that strategy for all children.
  • The status quo in the Reading Wars is not based upon the merits of an argument but upon the politics of state legislation.  Once again, money plus lobbying causes legislation and policy decisions not the righteousness of an argument.

Two sides stand in opposition regarding the teaching of reading, the Reading Wars Saga redux in Wisconsin, and it is important for any person concerned with educating children to understand the battle line.  I use the singular battle line, because I find the arguments boil down to a single question.  Shall educators use the understandings and instructional strategies of the Science of Reading (SoR) to teach reading and language acquisition to children or not?  There is not an argument for other strategies for the teaching of reading.  Those strategies are an amalgamation of ideas and approaches for the teaching of reading, usually encompassed as whole language or blended reading.  No, the issue is whether we will use the phonics-based strategies of SoR.  It is the same argument of the 1980s and 1990s Reading Wars grown up, because we know much more about reading and language acquisition today than we knew in the last century. 

I point to the Institute for Multi-Sensory Education (IMSE) for an example of SoR.  This document summarizes the approaches of SoR that are pertinent to the argument.  There are many others – I picked this.

What is the Science of Reading?

At the heart of SoR are a child’s abilities to encode sounds into words and decode words into sounds and from these abilities acquire vocabulary, learn to spell, learn to read complex and complicated text, and to write with fluency.  Children who cannot encode and decode reading and language are exiled to a life of frustration and low achievement in a world that requires literacy.

When I ask someone who opposes SoR why they do so, two statements invariably are heard.  Phonics-based instruction requires drilling in the sounds and spellings of phonemes and morphemes and some children are put off by this repetition.  They are bored.  And, some children can learn to read naturally – just let them read and guide their reading as it grows.  Schools have adopted complete reading programs based upon not boring children and the belief that with minimal foundational skills and maximal reading opportunities children will become successful readers.

Is that it?  Yep, that is the long and short of an argument.

On the other hand, SoR speaks of foundational encoding and decoding skills for all children, especially those who have learning challenges or whose early home life does not present much reading encouragement or whose natural abilities satisfy primary grade reading material but struggle with more complex vocabulary and language in the secondary grades. 

In simple terms, SoR teaches children phonemic awareness of sound-letter correlations, to use phonetic patterns to understand and use regular and irregular words, to read and pronounce words with fluency, to build complex and technical vocabulary based upon phonetic patterns, and the comprehend the meaning of words and word families.  This is a structured approach that is individualized to a child’s learning needs.

Therein lies a compelling difference in the argument about reading instruction.  Shall we leave success to each child’s native abilities and opportunities presented at home and school when then are young or shall we instruct every child with the skills to read and understand language for a lifetime? 

In the 1990s the forces in Wisconsin for blended and whole language moved the state legislature to adopt language favoring non-phonics-based reading instruction.  A simple phrase in the WI Stat 18.19 says that teacher preparation shall include phonics-based reading, but that a course is phonics-based reading is not required.  Over the past 30 years teachers in our state’s teacher prep programs have received such nominal instruction in phonics-based reading that when asked to describe encoding and decoding skills, phonemic awareness, and linguistics, most cannot.  Elementary teachers today are illiterate regarding the SoR.  Sadly, legislation and lobbying efforts against SoR stymy teacher education.

Educational data, especially data that is disaggregated, describes a flattening of reading achievement in Wisconsin over the past fifteen years.  Whole language and blended reading instruction cause some children to succeed as readers, but less than half of all children can achieve proficiency in reading or language assessments on state assessments.  And, children with learning disabilities invariably achieve at a basic or minimal level.  When we disaggregate the data, we find that children with dyslexia not only do not achieve, they decline in achievement over time and educationally “die” in frustration.  Our systems are not working for all children.

This is a good fight in the non-combative and non-life-threatening struggles of the public education Wisconsin provides to all enrolled children.  Shall all children learn to read?  All children not just those who can read without explicit instruction.  Shall state legislation and teacher preparation programs be reformed to endorse SoR or will they continue with a status quo of minimal and selective achievement?  It is fight for the future of our children.

Assure There Will Be No Yada Yada in September

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Gut-check time.  A gut-check is a moment of reflection, introspection, clarity, and commitment.  This September, when schools return to as close to normal as they have been in 18 months, when the need for a remote education has been eased by vaccination, and school activity levels rise nearly to pre-pandemic engagement, we, public schools, need to do a gut-check of our priorities.  After becoming what we are not, closed and diminished campuses for child education, what is it that we want to be in the new normal?

Try these small checks.

  • Re-examine your school mission statement and educational objectives.  Mission and objectives are designed as the philosophic base for your school’s educational programming.  Read the entire statement beginning to end.  I did and I heard Elaine from Seinfeld muttering “Yada, yada, yada” in my ears.  Thinking maybe it was just my district’s document, I read the position statements of other regional districts and Elaine was in my ears again and again. 

What safely worded drivel!  We “encourage” and “ provide opportunity for” generalized educational achievements that prepare our students and graduates for a world we only think we apprehend.  Or, for the world we, as current adult school leaders, live in today.  We “enhance” and “aspire” and “hope” children will be these things.  And, then we shoot for average, state or national statistics, that we know from the beginning of our hopes are below par.  Weak verbs leading to weak outcomes. Drivel now and when we wrote it.

Is this the best we can be in our time of renewal?  Is this best we can do?

  • Reread your curriculum guides.  To what extent are the outcomes of each instructional unit compelling and a demonstration of significant learning growth?  Or, are they statements of things done, time spent, a check list checked off?

Children in remote education engaged in too much non-compelling curricula, especially when instruction included lengthy screen time, and expectations were set at the “just get it done” level of performance.  Such was education in a pandemic.

I observed flashes of strong teaching and learning from individual teachers using highly interactive, daily connection with remote children in the 20-21 school year.  There were “All Star” teachers working in a completely foreign school environment who caused their children to learn.  However, there were many more examples of classrooms where minimum was all that was given and all that was required.

That can not be the case in September.  Compelling engagement and strong demonstration of learning must describe our new requirements not just expectations.  If we, and there is no reason to, continue with pandemic-level teaching and learning in September, apathetic and lethargic student engagement in remote education will be our new normal. 

  • Realign your programming.  Remote education caused schools to prioritize reading, mathematics and academic book subjects and to minimize or eliminate instruction that required hands-on and one-to-one interaction, such as art, music, foreign language, and technical education. 

Prior to September, rebuild your capacity for total programming.  Daily instruction in the total curricular program must be visible in the school schedules made public in July and August.  Equity must be apparent, not a valued and devalued set of programs.  Don’t wait until September. 

Totality of programming includes the arts, athletics, and student activities.  While classes may begin in late August or early September, fall sports, theater, and marching and pep band begin weeks before.  Get in front of all 21-22 programming with new, inclusive, high requirement statements of learning and performance outcomes. 

This is not an attempt at a “best we can be or do” question.  It is a “we must be better” imperative.  If we cannot be compelling and strong in our requirements, COVID will have caused another pandemic fatality – public education.

Every organization must do its own gut-check as it emerges from the Time of COVID.  Some organizations will not survive the pandemic.  Schools will.  Our gut-check must be a matter of conscience.  We will not be guilt-driven but conscience-compelled to be better than we were in the pandemic but also better than were pre-pandemic.

The purpose of gut-checking is not an organizational selfie.  Gut-checks clarify what was and define what must be.  It is time to be better!