The “I Ching” teaches that “Before there can be great brilliance… there must be chaos.”
This is PART 5 in a series of blog posts that document our research, strategic thinking, observations and debates as we take on one of the last vestiges of the industrial revolution: the practice in schools of organizing kids into grade levels according to their chronological age.
At the end of the day on Friday I received a phone call from Max in the Superintendent’s office. Max was contacting all the principals in the district to get our individual prediction on what we anticipate our API will be this year. We all have a guess. We live the API.
The API is California’s Academic Performance Index. It is a long and tortured statistical calculation that synthesizes each school’s test results into a 3-digit number. Every student at every grade and every subject area is calculated and “processed” like an elegant wood chipper that grinds otherwise healthy leaves and limbs into useful chips. It weighs the number of students that score proficient and reflects overall organizational growth from year to year. Every school in California is obligated to somehow reach the API promised land of 800 or face the fate of the mastodons.
“To tell you the truth Max… I have no clue. You want me to just pull a number out of the air?
“Yep… the Superintendent wants every principal’s prediction.”
“Well…last year we ended up at 797 but our school-wide goal was 801. We just missed it. A little better result from this grade or that grade and we would have made it. Just make up a number?”
“Whatever you think.”
“We just held the Olympic Festival yesterday, Max. The best one in 9 years. We had a 1000 students participating with well over 100 adult volunteers and parents and guests. There were 25 different events for kids. We had two former olympians. We had India’s first ever winter olympian, for God’s sake.! She is an Alpine ski racer, Max! But the Olympic Festival and our community spirit and Alpine skiers and our year-end celebration have nothing to do with our API. It doesn’t compute.”
“I just need a number Dr. Riley.”
“Our 6th graders bombed the local measures. I think they might have done it on purpose. Only 7 out of 120 students were proficient on the math section. How do I factor that in, Max?”
“Uh…can’t help you on that one.”
“But then again, on the MAPS assessments our 6th graders were right on pace. And that is a much more difficult assessment, don’t you think?”
“No clue sir. I’m not familiar with SNAPS.”
“And we know that if 50% of our students– especially 50% of our English language learners– don’t score proficient on the California Standards Test we will miss the AYP benchmark for the first time and we will go into Program Improvement. We know that. We are climbing a mountain. So we added a full hour to the instructional day and tried to target students who were borderline. And every teacher provided English Language Development to every student for :35 minutes every single day. Damn… that has to count for something!”
“So you want me to put you down for 801 again?”
“Yea, I guess so. NO! I can’t say 801… that was last year’s goal. This year our goal is 840!”
“So you want me to put you down for 840?”
“C’mon Max…there is no way we hit 840. Too many distractions over the longer day. I think our teachers got burned out mid-year. We pushed too hard. By March we had to make adjustments just to keep their morale up. If we caught it soon enough and made the best of the additional hour and kept our focus in every classroom… we could get a pretty good bump in our API. But if not… if we really did lose a significant number of our teachers somewhere on the journey… we are hosed.”
“Sounds like you want to stay closer to the 801. You have to say at least 800.”
“We could go backwards Max! We could go back down to 790! When the district told everybody in January that they had to resign to stay at El Milagro or return to a district school… it affected morale too. 18 of our teachers are district employees and 15 are employees of Mueller Charter School. What a freakin’ mess! It never should have worked out that way. Five of our veteran teachers decided that they would leave El Milagro and go back to the district. So we have been dealing with that and interviewing new teachers and writing letters of recommendations. These are our colleagues we are losing!”
“Ok… listen I am going to just say 795 for Mueller Charter School…”
“You know what the problem is here Max? The problem is we give the CST to students according to their grade level… instead of their level of mastery…”
Silence on the other end.
“Max… do you read my blog?”
“No I don’t have time to read blogs because I make phone calls like this all day and just try to stay ahead of the information that the superintendent is trying to gather.”
“Ok… just put us down for 805.”
“805…got it. Thank you Dr. Riley, it’s been nice talking to you and….”
“And make a note Max that we are really looking hard at this whole system of grouping kids in grade levels according to their age. It doesn’t make sense anymore. ”
“Ok I wrote that down.”
But of course I know he really didn’t. And I realized immediately that this is exactly how the status quo stays in tact from year to year; how it absorbs change. I had no business giving Max some arbitrary number meant to quantify the depth of teaching and learning that took place at Mueller Charter School over the course of an entire year. The ups and downs. The celebrations. The growth and the turmoil and the daily struggle for fresh air. 805? 840?
It is the reason that we seek to challenge the very structure of how we group our students for learning and testing. So I started to pull up my blog to re-read the questions I had generated last week and maybe add to the list. Just then the phone rang again. It was Max.
“Dr. Riley… did you say an Alpine skiier from India? Didn’t they make a movie about her?”
“No Max… that was the Jamaican bobsled team.”
“Oh…yea…that’s right…Cool Runnings.”
In Taekwondo and other martial arts, students are assigned a white belt until they demonstrate mastery of ALL of the techniques, blocks, kicks, forms, and philosophies that are taught at that beginning of the learning continuum. They advance through the curriculum- color belt by color belt– until they reach the level of black belt. There is a high price to pay for not mastering all of those blocking and striking techniques if you spar with another black belt so Taekwondo instructors tend to promote students only when they are ready to be promoted.
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