Happy Holidays! Thank you for being a part of Ethical ELA this year. At Ethical ELA we consider the practical alongside the ethical – always asking what is good and right for the human beings with whom we are entrusted (and for us). I began this work a little over a year ago because, well, I needed this compass.On the toughest days, what is good and right can be clouded by anger or exhaustion but knowing you are all here has given me the courage to revisit those days and make sense of the complexities of our practice –to do and be better. In this post I revisit my first year of teaching with you. It is the first chapter in my book published by Routledge in September 2016:Genocide Literature in Middle and Secondary Classrooms: Rhetoric, Witnessing, and Social Action in a time of Standards and Accountability .
NCLB and Genocide:My First Year as a Teacher
I grew up in a middle class family just outside Chicago, the ninth of eleven children. As a kid, I played with Barbie dolls and tried the sports my older siblings played like soccer and softball never really finding my niche. In elementary school, I ran for class vice president and later secretary of the student council but never won; I was not popular. I practiced my penmanship diligently so that I could earn the right to use a pen and developed a callous that still reminds me today. In middle school, my father lost his job and never really worked again. While we continued to live in the same neighborhood, we were, in essence, living below the poverty line and surviving on donations from our Catholic church. I spent most nights lying awake watching anywhere from three to five of my ten siblings sleeping in bed rolls on the floor around me. We could not afford beds nor would the number we needed even fit in the three bedrooms of our small home. When I did sleep, I would often sleepwalk and talk in my dreams, never able to fully rest my mind or body. Despite the size of my family, eight girls and three boys, and even though my father was unemployed for most of my childhood, in many ways, it was typical, white-bread Americana with church on Sundays, park district sports, roller skating through the neighborhood, family dinners, and certainly sibling rivalry (especially over boys).
But there were differences. In a family of eleven, the odds were with us. We learned about teen pregnancy and adoption first-hand. We learned about discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation first-hand. We learned about mental illness first-hand. And we learned about divorce first-hand. I learned all these life lessons as a teenager, so I considered myself somewhat well- informed on social issues and even poverty. While working my way through college, I studied sociology and later worked as a counselor in a jail for a number of years where I had the privilege of listening to hundreds of life stories – usually through security glass in jail visiting rooms, virtually all of which included tough early-school experiences. I later became a teacher hoping to teach with and learn from the power of stories, which brought me to Lincoln Junior High School (pseudonym) in 2004 for my first teaching job. I entered the teaching profession in the early years of No Child Left Behind when school districts were scrambling to design systems to close the “achievement gap,” the disparity in academic performance between groups of students based on income, race, language, and ability. I could not have anticipated that the stories that helped me make sense of my world and the stories I had hoped to read and write alongside my students would be gradually pushed aside in a march toward higher test scores, and I that I would be complicit.
Teaching English with NCLB and Data-Driven Instruction
I began teaching middle school English in the fall of 2004 at Lincoln Junior High School. What I found, at least on first impression, was that Lincoln was situated in a middle class community much like where I grew up. However, there were physical and social signs of change. Several trailers sat on the grounds of the school to accommodate the growing English as a Second Language (ESL) program. I was joining Lincoln as an aspect of the district’s plan to respond to the school’s changing demographics, which was to hire more bilingual staff and ESL certified teachers and integrate ESL methods in mainstream classrooms.
Lincoln educated the children from the neighborhood, who were mostly white, and children from neighboring elementary schools. The demographics of Lincoln changed so quickly in the early 2000s that the school purchased trailers for the expanding ESL program. Many veteran Lincoln teachers who had taught middle class European Americans for decades were unfamiliar with strategies to support new Lincoln students’ linguistic, cultural, and economic needs. My credentials were quite different from the majority of the faculty at the time. I had training in ESL methods, could speak Spanish fairly well, and had a lot of experience working with low income families in my social work career and graduate assistantship teaching ESL in Chicago’s Little Village. Given the demographic shift, I was surprised that the two in-service days preceding the first day of school in 2004 were spent looking at data rather than talking about the linguistic, social, and economic needs of our changing school community.
The first English department meeting of the school year was part of the in-service. We met in room H103, the department chair’s classroom. English teachers flipped through class rosters with test scores from the previous school year’s state exam, the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT). As I looked around the room of a dozen or so teachers furiously highlighting away, I quickly grabbed a highlighter intent to look like I knew what I was doing. I was told to highlight the students who were “on the bubble.” Noticing my confusion, Diane, the department head who later became a good friend, explained that a student “on the bubble” meant that the student did not “meet” standards on ISAT but was within a few points of “meeting.” In other words, “bubble kids” had the potential to actually pass the ISAT test this year if we “targeted” them. When I asked about all the other students who were below these cut off scores, she essentially said that they were too far below in reading to bring them up to grade level in one year and that the administration had directed department chairs to concentrate on the “bubble kids.” I went to work in silence, remembering advice from my student teaching experience: “Do more listening than speaking.” I listened (and highlighted).
What did it mean to “target” a student? I was told that, once identified, “bubble kids” would need extra attention until the March ISAT test in order to raise their ISAT scores, and the “district-approved” curriculum, which would help me to target the skills those students needed, was primarily a textbook aligned to the Illinois State Standards. Students below the bubble would benefit, too, but many of those students would also be placed in an additional reading intervention class.
My department chair went on to explain what was at stake. In 2001, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was signed into law. School districts were scrambling to meet the requirements of NCLB, specifically the requirement that 100 percent of students must “meet” on their state reading and math tests by the year 2013-14. Essentially, NCLB redefined the federal role in K-12 education to close the achievement gap between students at the lower end of the performance scale (referring to minority, low-income students) and those performing better (typically middle class white students). Federal funding for schools was soon based on student achievement. If any achievement gaps were identified through the testing process, the school district had to address those issues with a plan for improvement. If schools did not perform and close the achievement gap identified by their state assessment, they risked losing federal funding and being “taken over” or “turned around” by the government. Due to Lincoln’s changing demographics, the district had a lot at stake in the early years of NCLB. Using the ISAT data to drive instruction and target achievement gaps so that we did not leave children behind sounded pretty good to me at the time.
I did not know the first thing about teaching English from data, using research-based lesson plans, or following a textbook’s scope and sequence. Thinking back to my own learning experiences with high-stakes tests, I couldn’t recall a single time that teachers asked me to look at my scores and set a goal for improving my reading or math scores. Maybe I was “targeted” and did not know it. Still, I do not remember test prep lessons for what was the Iowa Basic Skills in my schooling, but I do remember test anxiety and comparing test results with my siblings (and feeling quite inadequate). And my teacher education courses did not prepare me for the data collection or goal-setting lessons I would have to create with my students nor did it prepare me for displaying data charts on my bulletin boards as a transparent accountability measure. What I was prepared to do was to develop conceptual units of study with primary sources and authentic writing experiences. I was prepared to provide narrative feedback and assess with portfolios. I had learned that the classroom walls should be covered with student writing and inspiration. The “good news” was that I did not have to spend my nights and weekends developing such units; the school district had purchased everything I needed, and all this was waiting for me in my classroom: G109. I just had to follow the teacher’s guide.
I was presented a district-approved textbook written by Who Knows and published by Prentice Hall, a Pearson Education company who offered “research-based” textbooks. I was given the silver level for my “regular classes,” (students at or below grade level in reading) and the gold level for my “gifted” class (students reading above grade level). The Pearson textbook package included CDs with recordings of every text (mostly excerpts from primary sources such as Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings or Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon), VHS tapes for “anticipatory activities,” a database for test questions, three levels of consumables (e.g., workbooks for on-level readers, adapted versions for those below level, and even an ESL version), and skills worksheets with every graphic organizer imaginable. Clearly, the district had invested significantly in not leaving any child behind. I did not know where to begin, so I took everything home and began making sense of it all – two days.
That year, and for a few years more, the classrooms and hallways were covered with data charts and mission statements to raise reading and math scores. I had students charting their reading scores and setting improvement goals. I posted lists grouping students by skill deficits: word analysis, literary works, literary devices, and comprehension. As a department, we “targeted” students by identifying a deficit, teaching to the deficit, and then assessing for growth. At one point in my first year, Lincoln even had visitors from other schools and districts to see how we were using data to drive instruction. (The year prior, our district won a prestigious quality award for corporate and social responsibility.) The visitors were mesmerized by my charts: weekly word analysis charts, comprehension competitions, and reading scores from quarter to quarter. These graphics were what our school called “quality tools” designed to troubleshoot quality-related issues: fishbones, check sheets, Pareto charts, scatter diagrams, and histograms. All teachers were encouraged to use these tools. I certainly did, and I was proud of it.
As a novice teacher, I did not understand why teachers complained about being underappreciated. The district office was visiting classrooms and celebrating teachers for their efforts. It seemed like teachers were literally shining a light on the students who had been or would be “left behind” had we not looked at the data. It seemed like we were targeting their needs and filling them. There were, however, always students below the “bubble.” And when those charts were posted for the school (and visitors) to see, a student knew which dot scattered in this or that quadrant represented her.
Year after year, students who did not “meet standards” on the state test received more interventions, an additive approach to improvement. When goal setting did not work, students were placed into an intervention class and tested more frequently. The intervention classes were often expensive scripted programs stating what to teach, when to teach it, and how to teach it. Such curriculum has been coined as “teacher-proof” curriculum. After all, when a child is in a school for a number of years and does not pass the test, the school must makes changes where it can: the curriculum and the teacher. I think that by hiring me, Lincoln was showing cultural and linguistic progress, and I think that by buying the Prentice Hall curriculum, Lincoln was showing progress with research-based materials, and, certainly, the “quality tools” represented the image of a cutting-edge education. However, in the name of progress, a typical junior high student below the bubble did not have room in her schedule for music, art, language, or technology classes. She spent her day in two math classes, three language arts classes, one science class, one history class, and one resource class (i.e., homework and linguistic support). In the name of progress, the potential of instruction to be guided by teachers, students’ stories and discovery was neutralized by the specter of the test and fear of failing to meet.
Even though I did not have to develop my own curriculum and had access to many “quality tools,” that first year of teaching was not easy. When I wasn’t looking at charts, I was trying to figure out the district-approved curriculum; I was overwhelmed by the graphic organizers, worksheets, and step-by-step teacher guides. Six eighth-grade groups of students came to me each day for forty-one minutes of reading or writing. We worked on labeling Freytag’s plot triangle and identifying the main idea, author’s purpose, and literary devices in texts – skills most students had been learning since third grade. While we did read short stories, poems, plays, and essays, we read them out of a five-pound textbook. And while we did discuss some works by Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Naomi Shihab Nye, Langston Hughes, and Walter Dean Myers, such discussions were guided by the manual and prompted by questions at the end of the text. We did not curl up with a good book on a Papasan chair or bean bag like I imagined when I was in my teacher education classes. Such a luxury would have interrupted our “progress.”
Even though most of these kids had been in our district for their entire education, being carefully monitored in the data, by the time they reached junior high, students’ reading levels ranged from second grade to high school. The systems of progress were failing many students, and it seemed quite apparent that the categories of students failing were in two of NCLB’s subgroups: low income and English language learners. NCLB required that 100 percent of students meet its Academic Yearly Progress goals, and that includes 100 percent of the subgroups. Subgroups are defined by race, socioeconomic status (i.e., students who receive free or reduced priced meals), special education, and English learners. Increasingly more of Lincoln’s students were represented in the low income and English learners subgroups.
Two Mandates Intersect: NCLB and Genocide Education
The fall of 2005 was the start of my second year of teaching and, once again, I sat in H103 with the English department doing data analysis. I was quiet and learned to stay quiet after finding, or being assigned, my place in the faculty hierarchy. Diane passed around some welcome-back brownies and said that we needed ideas on two topics. According to the 2004 ISAT data, our students scored lowest on inferencing questions, so we would have to develop a system for targeting inferencing. Apparently, inferencing was the English teacher’s nemesis. How does one teach inferencing well?
“Maybe we could develop a PowerPoint on inferencing,” one teacher suggested.
“Maybe we should test this skill weekly and assess the data,” suggested another.
We were fairly certain there was some worksheet on inferencing in the Prentice Hall materials. Most of us agreed, however, that inferencing is not easily measured by multiple choice questions, and the ISAT is a multiple choice test. Then, Diane continued with the second item on our agenda: we also had to do some curriculum planning for a new mandate. Our curriculum was essentially Prentice Hall, so we were puzzled, but then Diane explained that the curriculum we would be planning was for a new unit on genocide. Groans came from every direction in H103.
Diane explained that in June Illinois became the first state in the nation to end state investment (to divest) in Sudan because Colin Powell declared the atrocities in Darfur “genocide.” At that time, I could not have pointed to Sudan on a map, and I could not have defined genocide. Based on the facial expressions of the other teachers, they couldn’t either. She went on to explain that in August, just weeks before school started, Illinois’ House and Senate enacted Public Act 094-0478, the Illinois Genocide Curriculum Mandate, requiring all Illinois public schools to include “an additional unit of instruction studying other acts of genocide across the globe.” This mandate was an amendment to Illinois’ Holocaust Education Mandate enacted in 1990. In addition to learning about the genocide in Sudan, Diane explained, students would learn about the Armenian Genocide, the forced famine in Ukraine, and other more recent atrocities in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Here is an excerpt from the press release written by Illinois’ then governor, Rod Blagojevich:
As we teach our kids the important lessons of history, we have to be sure that they understand that racial, national, ethnic and religious hatred can lead to horrible tragedies. Sadly, these are not just the problems of our parents’ or grandparents’ generations. We have to make sure our schools teach the importance of embracing differences among people and encourage students to fight intolerance and hatred wherever they see it. (August 2005)
On my desk were printouts of data, numbers that indicated students’ lack of inferencing skills, and alongside this was an announcement, a mandate, that schools will teach “the importance of embracing differences” and encourage “students to fight intolerance and hatred.” At the time, I was wondering about how I could teach inferencing in the genocide unit. Indeed, inferencing is quite important when it comes to deciphering genocide intent: in the absence of direct evidence, genocide intent can be inferred from circumstantial evidence. I was not, however, thinking of this. I was thinking about how to improve test scores. The irony of teaching genocide with data-driven instruction or attempting to quantify some understanding of genocide had not, at the time, occurred to me. The state was putting students into groups by their race, culture, class, language and ability. Teachers were asked to target those students so that they could perform better on a state test. And now, the state was mandating that we teach about genocide, the intent to systematically eliminate racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural groups of human beings. How did one measure the ability to embrace differences and fight intolerance? What would that test look like? How would I “target” a low score on intolerance?
The mandate emerged out of a well-intended sense of moral outrage at the crimes against humanity in Sudan, but like most mandates, it felt like more work for teachers. No content or standard was going to be removed to make space for something new, which meant we would have to cut out or rush through other units; we would have to find the materials and create the lesson plans. Because it was an unfunded mandate, we would have to use our department funds to buy genocide literature, which meant we would need to read literature about genocides and decide, together, what was appropriate for our students and what was worth buying with our precious department money. The greatest concern, however, was that this new mandate came at a time when testing was replacing teaching time, and test scores were used to evaluate teachers, track sub groups, and rate schools.
The junior high English teachers at Lincoln responded to this mandate in a variety of ways: a sigh, a rolling of the eyes, a “what is genocide” whisper, and a “yes, important” comment. As a group, however, we questioned why we, the English department, were discussing it and not the History department, to which Diane responded that our curriculum had more space for this added unit. It seemed to her that since we were able to find some great literature to teach the Holocaust in our English classes that we would be able to find some great literature about these genocides, which sounded logical. Indeed, I taught a unit on the Holocaust the previous year with help from the department and the textbook. The Holocaust unit was in April after ISATs. I was woefully unprepared to discuss unimaginable atrocities with eighth graders after having spent the first half of the year thinking about data. The Prentice Hall literature textbook included Goodrich and Hackett’s dramatic adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank complete with lesson plans, which was a big help, but the publishers clearly had not anticipated this additional genocide unit in their standards-aligned, research-based textbook.
Conclusion
Any veteran teacher will tell you that education initiatives come and go. Some resonate with teachers more than others, and some have more staying power. Teachers have learned to go with such initiatives (or appear to anyway). This mandate resonated with me, stirred something in me. I was hearing an opportunity to think about how the world, our world, was changing. Clearly, Lincoln was changing. I was part of that change, but this 2005 mandate reiterated the need for a cultural, political, and even moral education that I was not so sure we were ready for. Instead of skill acquisition as a way of participating in this world, the mandate asked us to teach a way of being, participating, and shaping the world. There was no textbook for that. No research-based curriculum. No test. It was up to us to do the inquiry into the topic and figure out a way to make it accessible to junior high students. The genocide mandate offered an opportunity to think about and talk about something other than goal setting, testing, and data analysis or rather to talk about such measurement practices and how they are, in fact, leaving kids behind. As one of eleven children, I struggled to make my voice heard, and as a teacher, I feel like I am still struggling to make my voice heard, but we have to scream for the rights of the students with whom we are entrusted. We have to be leaders in what and how English is taught in schools.
Works Cited
Atwell, Nancie. In the Middle: New Understandings About Writing, Reading, and Learning. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1987. Print.
“Gov. Blagojevich Signs Law Expanding Genocide Education in Illinois: Studies will now include recent atrocities in Armenia, Ukraine, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Sudan.” News. Springfield: Office of the Governor, 2005. Web.
“Illinois General Assembly – Full Text of Public Act 094-0478.” Illinois General Assembly Home Page. 24 Apr. 2011. Web.
“Illinois Genocide Curriculum Mandate.” Genocide Education Network of Illinois.org. Web.
Prentice Hall: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes, Silver Level. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2002. Print.