“I have lifted the rock and seen the worms writhing underneath.”
― James Hynes, Sparrow

Summer has officially started in the Weber household. It’s a welcome but mixed change.

Kids may be home, but the lazy days have not replaced the school days.

Both children are now high schoolers, bringing on a plethora of new responsibilities and opportunities.

The boy child is at the mid-point of travel baseball season, which fills the weekends and some weekends.

His first high school football camp opened last week, and he’s quickly realizing, we are not in middle school anymore. He routinely grumbles, “I signed up to play football, not run track.”

Basketball tryouts were held last week, and he and three of the four young men who started playing together in 6th grade made the team. The fourth moved south the previous year, leaving a hole that is still felt. It’s cool thinking that these 3 may end up playing 7 years together, surely a rarity.

Basketball camp is held at noon, right after 3 hours of football. Yes, more running.

The girl child returns to school next week for three weeks with Vanderbilt University’s Science and Math program. This year begins the set up to junior year, which will be spent working in an actual lab and producing a published research paper. Heady stuff.

She’s elected to take ballet class this summer for the first time, usually, summer serves as a break from dance. This year, dreams of achieving pointe are becoming a little more real.

In between they are engaging in all the routine activities of kids their age – going to the pool, talking to classmates via FaceTime, and going to the mall. The most frequent statement heard, “Is what’s the plan for today”, which is met by an equally familiar, “I don’t about you, but I have work.”

I suspect the ensuing years will become even more cluttered.

All of this reminds me that the time for the leaving of the nest is fast approaching. Three years may seem like an eternity, but it’ll be over in the blink of an eye, and he’ll quickly follow.

It doesn’t feel as if we are that far removed from the elementary years, when time felt eternal. But, here we are.

The Kansas City kicker, whatever his name is, was bombarded with criticism for celebrating family at a recent graduation ceremony, (I know, he threw in a bunch of stupid stuff as well). Still, I have to tell you, there have been no greater challenges with no greater rewards than serving as a husband and a parent.

I’m grateful for all of it, and look forward to another summer of memories, may yours be equally as rich.

– – –

How’d you like to be a rising fourth-grader and be unsure if you would retain that title?

Tennessee state law requires that students who fail to achieve a score of “meets expectations” on the state’s annual TCAP must be retained. Those scores came back two weeks ago.

A provision of the same law allows for those students who fall short to retake the test, minus the writing portion. That window opened on May 22nd and closed on May 31st.

According to the Tennessee Department of Education, families of students in 3rd grade who scored “approaching” on the ELA section of their spring 3rd grade TCAP or the ELA TCAP retake may also submit an appeal to the department beginning May 28th through June 28th. Beginning this year, authorized district personnel may submit an appeal on behalf of a student with parent or guardian consent. A link to the appeal form will be available here on May 28th and can be submitted based on either the Ground 1 or Ground 2 requirements.

June 28th?!?

So a family can enter the last month of summer and have no idea where their child will go to school. A school can have uncertainty around staffing and spacing a month before school starts. It’s incredulous.

Mary Batiwalla, a former assistant commissioner with the Tennessee Department of Education, told Fox 17, the timeline puts too much pressure on local districts.

“In terms of doing the calculations, making the determination of who needs to re-test, executing the re-test, and then processing re-test results, and notifying parents and students about what needs to happen next,” Batiwalla explained.

When questioned by concerned parents and schools, the TDOE answer is invariably, just enroll them in summer school and tutoring for next year and it will all be fine. Legislators echo that sentiment when questioned about the validity of the bill.

Everybody seems to forget that by enrolling in summer school and tutoring for promotion, students are at risk for retention in fourth grade if they don’t make adequate process on the fourth-grade TCAP. Keep in mind that defining what constitutes adequate growth requires the employment of a formula that feels pulled from a chalkboard on the Big Bang television series. Those results won’t be returned until late June.

So how many kids are at risk?

How many students scored below “meets expectations” on the initial test or the retake?

How many kids are enrolled in Summer School?

What’s the difference between the initial year and this year?

All valid questions, none of which have ready answers.

As we enter June, details and data are scarce. Too many questions remain unanswered. Nobody seems to know just how this process is working.

This is not a computer simulation. There are real lives impacted by the missing data.

We seem capable of screaming for months about the manifesto of a since deceased serial killer but express nary a peep about data that serves the living.

I guess we’ll eventually know the results.

Maybe it’ll be like last year when the TDOE released test results from the previous year a week before testing for the current year was scheduled to begin.

– – –

One thing Tennesseans can seem to focus on is education vouchers. A month after the session ended with no new legislation passed, we are still talking about them.

This week it was reported that Governor Lee is hitting the campaign trail in support of school-choice candidates.

“I’ve said a lot of times that I get engaged in election, and I get engaged in candidates. I’ve met with several candidates, some of who are in open seats, some who are incumbents,” Lee said in a press availability last week. “This year, what I’m talking to candidates about is education, freedom, and choice for parents. I want to know where new candidates stand on that issue because it’s so important to me.”

Lee’s not just out vetting, he’s bringing the checkbook as well. Well maybe not his, but certainly money belonging to close out-of-state friends.

Americans for Prosperity Action — a powerful grassroots group whose sister policy organization lobbied the legislature in support of Lee’s school choice initiative this year — has endorsed several candidates this year. Less than one-tenth of 1% of AFP Action’s national PAC contributions come from within Tennessee, according to FEC filings, while a combined 73% of the PAC’s donations this cycle have come from donors in Virginia, Kansas, and Arkansas.

“We intend to fully leverage our grassroots efforts to support each of our policy champions, and we will continue to monitor the field to ensure all policy champions in need of support during the primary season have it,” AFP Action Director Tori Venable said in a statement to The Tennessean.

If I’m part of the anti-vouchers crowd, I appreciate the Governor’s vetting commitment. I’d ask him to share his evaluations. You know, don’t want anyone slipping through the cracks.

If you don’t want vouchers, you better make sure the Guv doesn’t up any seats, that means heavy politicking.

Earlier in the year, Texas anti-voucher activists cheered the defeat of a proposed bill for their state. The victory was short-lived.

In the wake of that defeat, Texas Governor Abbott declared his intent to continue his pursuit of expanded school choice legislation.

AFP committed themselves to making his pursuit successful and began campaigning against anti-voucher House members.

In March, they managed to turn six seats in the Texas House to pro-voucher candidates, sending an additional eight GOP anti-choice incumbents to a runoff.

Six of those eight lost their seats last week.

Supporters are poised to nominate at least four pro-voucher candidates to fill seats vacated by retiring voucher opponents, netting a total of 10 seats before the overtime round.

What this translates to is Governor Abbott having a tentative majority in the lower chamber on his signature issue. The House is where the legislation was defeated.

It hasn’t been a cheap victory for Abbott and friends.

AFC Victory Fund, the super PAC political arm of the voucher advocacy group American Federation for Children, has spent around $2 million in the runoffs boosting pro-voucher primary challengers. And Club for Growth, a federal PAC, reserved some $4 million in TV and radio ads targeting the four anti-voucher Republicans who were pushed into runoffs, along with House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont.

Will Tennessee serve as a sequel? Who knows.

But, if you don’t want the same in Tennessee, best get to door-knocking.

– – –

What if I told you that a local school district was holding its annual principal meeting this week and all district principals were mandated to attend?

What if I then told you that one principal was designated not to be rehired, but somebody forgot to inform him?

What if I told you the district hired his replacement on Friday?

What if I told you both principals were present when the principal conclave opened up?

You wouldn’t believe me, would you?

– – –

The former dovetails into a recent column by education writer Peter Greene. He begins the piece in the best possible way, by mentioning Moi and a piece I’d written about social and emotional learning.

Greene writes:

“I’ve made my points about SEL before. I think attempts to formalize it and teach it in deliberate classroom instruction are a mistake. that at best they are just kind of silly and at worst result in entering a Human Decency Grade in a student’s permanent record. At the same time, actual SEL is inseparable from the classroom. That’s because young humans are always learning social-emotional stuff, always learning how to function like human beings in the world. Every adult in a child’s life is modeling some sort of social and emotional behavior. Every “this teacher changed my life” story an SEL story.”

He further explains:

Folks who want to somehow get SEL out of education and just go back to learnin’ reading, writing and ‘rithmetic are asking to eat chicken soup without any both, to be married without having another person involved. This is the empty view of education as some sort of content delivery system, a process by which facts are poured into a young human’s brain, perhaps by the latest version of computerized algorithmic “education.” 

Except here’s the thing– even that approach includes SEL, even if the SEL lesson delivered is “Your humanity doesn’t matter” or “Life is strictly transactional” or “Only some peoples’ feelings matter” or, in the case of your AI personalized computer program, “Some people are not worth bothering to have human interactions with.”

So even folks like the “premiere pronatalists” who believe Certain People should have lots of kids, but who raise their own kids by hanging an iPad around two year old’s neck and smacking a toddler in the face for bumping a table– well, they certainly imbue their children with all sorts of SEL lessons. Will a school program overwrite the SEL lessons taught at home? 

Every school is chock full of SEL in the form of the school’s culture and the teacher’s classroom culture. This is a big reason that so many schools are absolutely wasting money on formal SEL programs. A nice little program teaching tolerance and kindness for thirty minutes a week cannot hope to make the slightest dent in a school where adults emphasize meanness-enforced compliance all day every day.

Here’s the money shot:

If your administrators and teachers spend every day grinding down students to get them to fall in line and do as their told, that is your SEL program. Research shows that some schools and some states have huge disparities between Black and White students when it comes to suspensions for defiant, disruptive, or disorderly behavior; if you are one of those schools, that’s your SEL program. My school, for a time, had obviously selective enforcement of dress code; whether an outfit was a violation or not depended on how good you looked in it. Don’t think for a moment that our students didn’t learn some social and emotional lessons from that. 

If you want students to learn grace and kindness, your faculty and staff and administration have to model grace and kindness (recognizing that grace and kindness can wear a wide variety of faces, and not all of them are warm and fuzzy). If you want students to develop socially and emotionally healthy interactions with each other, the adults in your school have to model socially and emotionally healthy interactions with each other (again recognizing that there are sooooo many ways to do that)”

So much truth in so many words. School districts get lost in mandates and goals. They love data and overlook people, forgetting that all of the data is provided by real people. We demand obedience while never stopping to explain the why, yet we wonder why conflicts and resentment arise.

Greene closes with a question and answers relevant to all of us:

Who really needs SEL? The adults in the building. If they aren’t up to speed, all the “Character Strong” sessions in the world will make a difference. Soft skills, human decency (whatever you think that looks like), kindness, grace, respect, integrity, honesty–these all run downhill in any organization, and in schools, students are at the bottom of the hill. It requires leadership and personal commitment. It’s up to adults to be thoughtful and deliberate about what they send rolling down that hill. 

Amen, brother, amen.

– – –

This morning The Tennessean published an interview with Nashville Education Advocate Sonya Thomas. Thomas leads the Nashville-based non-profit PROPEL, Parents Requiring Our Public Education System to Lead.

A primary focus of the organization has been on literacy rates. Thomas has been an advocate for Tennessee’s literacy laws but argues that they don’t go far enough. They don’t adequately engage parents.

“I do this work because I never want another parent to feel the way I felt when I realized my son was not getting the education he needed and he deserved,” she told The Tennessean. “When parents are ‘in the know,’ they take action. I believe parents aren’t taking action because they just don’t know.”

She ain’t wrong. Districts will argue that they provide sufficient data to inform parents of where their children are in learning to read, but Thomas disputes that.

A white paper produced by her organization shows that because of positive report cards, 78% of the Nashville parents who were surveyed believe their kids are reading at grade level. Meanwhile, data compiled by the state reveals that only 28.5% of students across MNPS—and only 19.6% of Black students—are.

That’s a disconnect.

Thomas cites numerous reasons for the disconnect:

No one will fight harder for a child’s right to read than their parent. But there is a belief gap about what parents are capable of. The system doesn’t believe parents have the capability to understand. There is some intentional and unintentional data-hoarding going on. The district has done a lot of good work to comply with state literacy laws — they’ve adopted great assessments that accurately measure students’ literacy progress at least three times per year, but that information is inconsistently shared with parents. They are an afterthought. What I mean by that is: Often reports are sent home via “backpack express.” The reports may or may not make it home, and if they do make it home, there is no instruction on how to read the results. Also, reports are typically not parent-facing, and report cards are not standards-based, which is why there is a massive gap in reality between grades and actual skills. That’s why our report calls this a “hidden crisis.” It’s largely hidden from parents. 

Again, she ain’t wrong.

PROPEL has some recommendations as well.

They are asking that MNPS share data consistently. Parent-friendly reports on a child’s reading progress should be shared with families in multiple ways promptly after each administration. Currently, the district administers at least six evaluations a year with results posted sporadically with little to no explanation.

They are asking for a redesign of report cards, It’s not sufficient to just assign a letter grade with no comments. In defense of teachers, they have little capacity to write comments for every student based on other demands on their time. This should be rectified.

Thomas ain’t wrong, and it behooves district leaders to pay her mind.

– – –

Per usual, I need to rattle the cup a little bit before I head out the door.

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Categories: Education