Today a Student Broke My Heart

I retired from teaching in 2008 but I like to keep my finger on the pulse of education today.

Ugh, that cliché: “finger on the pulse.” 

If I was still working with students, I’d challenge any who used it to come up with something more original if they could.

And I know they could.

Even now, I enjoy looking at the posts and comments and seeing the passion for the job displayed by so many young educators on various Facebook pages. Today, I spotted this comment by Felicia Swanger on the Middle School Social Studies Teachers page. I asked to copy it to my blog and she gave the okay. 

Here is what she wrote:

Today a student broke my heart. My fifth period class was rowdy while I dealt with a personal problem in the hallway. This isn’t something I do often, but today was that day.

When I came back in, I read them the riot act. I was lecturing them on responsibility and taking things seriously and stopping the nonsense and foolishness, when I looked at those kids and changed tactics.

I told them we were going to gain some focus and I started with a random kid and told him what I saw in him, all of the good things. Then I went to the next one, and so on. When I got to the fifth kid, his head was down and I said, “And you sell yourself short. You have told me several times that you want to quit school as soon as you can and have it behind you. You would rather be outside than sitting in this room, and that’s fine. Academic learning isn’t for everyone. But I want you to know that there are plenty of things you can do that you enjoy that can make you very successful”. We discussed his love of mechanics and I tried to show him that he did in fact have a functioning brain because he was good at things that the rest of us weren’t.

I went on with my discussions and told one little girl that she made the world better just by being in it, that her smile and happiness made people feel better and that she would be great with scared kids because she could put them at ease. 

The previous kid speaks up and says, “I wish I had had a teacher like that in 3rd grade when I moved schools. I was scared and lonely, and no one made me feel better.” That’s when this child’s light was extinguished. One careless teacher made him feel worthless for the next five years. I hope I lit his spark again today.

We have to be so careful with our actions and words. Our students are so important. They begin their journey 100% good and 100% curious and 100% accepting of others, and then the adults in their lives shape them. We let our stresses over testing mandates steal the joy from them.

We have let school become a place of worksheets and assessments at the elementary level where kids need to be fostering a love of discovery. The end result of a child’s education is not to score well on a test; it’s to gain the skills and knowledge necessary to be successful in life. Every child is capable of success. We just need to change our definition of what success looks like.

First, I wanted to copy her words because I love the way she addressed the children in her room, finding the good in each. I had served with the Marines before I became a teacher, myself, and I trust my old students would tell you, I could chastise the recalcitrant with the greatest of skill. Yet, my purpose was always the same as hers. I always wanted to put my teens on the right path, if they weren’t—and most were—and spent all my years in a classroom trying to do what she was doing this day. She was set on finding the good in her students, showing them it was there, if they didn’t realize, and bringing it out.

When I asked if I could post her words, I got a second, powerful but negative jolt.

She had this to say about her original post:

I think I have humpty-dumptied this week and decided that things need to change in education. I haven’t slept but one night this week because I decided to launch a crusade. Lol. I have sent a deeply heartfelt email to legislators in my state asking them to change our education practices and structure. I got generic responses, so I am taking it to social media next. It’s an awesome platform.

Sorry, for the long response, but even after seventeen years I remain passionate about this cause.

To be honest, after recovering from the jolt, I was almost relieved to read what she said. When I retired, I wondered if I was losing my mind. I already thought standardized testing was a curse. I told my last principal in my mind I felt teaching to the test was a form of “educational malpractice.”

She neither had a good response to offer, nor did she have a choice. She had to push us to teach to the test or risk losing her job.

I taught American history, myself, but I had a passion for books and tried to pass that on to my classes. I couldn’t work miracles with every student, of course. But I had more than enough success to make the effort worthwhile and convince me I was doing the Lord’s library work in getting teens to read more and read better books. Not long ago, I had lunch with one of my old students and she presented me three books she has come to love. The inscription in the first captures what I believe education is truly about, exactly what Ms. Swanger was trying to achieve with her kind words.

We all reach young people in our own meaningful and different ways. I taught with a great band instructor who turned teens into musicians who made music a career. Two colleagues took decent runners and transformed them into cross country stars. I taught with several English teachers who taught teens to find pure joy in writing and words. There’s no way to measure what these people did—but I believe they were doing something great. You can’t “measure” the solace Ms. Swanger provided to her students on just this one day; but that solace, that shot of well-timed kindness, may resonate down all the years of their lives. I could cite a hundred examples more from my career, of educators who made their marks in ways that will never show up on any standardized test.

I feel confident in saying Ms. Swanger could too. The more I believe that, the more I worry about what is happening in education today.

Last Friday, I was reading with Ellora, my four-year-old granddaughter. She’s just figuring out how to decode words, and I was giving pointers, when I remarked, “You know Papa used to be a teacher, right?”

“Papaukulele,” she replied, using a nonsense word she has coined, that never fails to spark my “outrage,” and provide her a laugh in turn.

Then it struck me.

Would I tell Ellora to go into teaching someday? I loved teaching every day of my career. But I don’t know if I would.

I took her to the park that afternoon and she had fun on the teeter-totters, balance ropes and Astroturf sliding hills. At one point we sat down on a large swing to rest. (She might not have needed the rest but I definitely did.)

A young mother made room for us both. She was watching her youngest scamper about and I started talking to her about raising kids and grandkids. She turned out to have been a teacher herself, I think she said for twelve years. Terry Hurt was her name and she said she’d taught in Texas, before leaving the classroom in 2005.

So I asked her the same question I ask every educator I meet. I’m like Rain Man, always posing the same query, always in a flat tone, hoping not to tip my opinion from the start. “Do you think all the standardized testing and focus on scores has helped education, hurt education, or had more or less a neutral effect?”

“Hurt,” Ms. Hurt answered almost as soon as the question was posed. “Does anyone ever say anything else?”

“Not really,” I laughed.

But what if this is no laughing matter? What if this is the existential question in U.S. education today?

If testing is hurting—as Ms. Hurt, Ms. Swanger and this old codger agree—what should we do?

Ms. Hurt told me her youngest would soon be going to school all day so she’s substituting and thinking about returning to the classroom full time.

“I went in to observe at my daughter’s school recently,” she told me, “but I’m not sure I could do what they’re asking young teachers to do today. It’s sad, too, because teaching was always my passion.”

Passion.

Thinks about that word. Can we measure passion for learning—and for imparting that passion to the young? I read what Ms. Swanger said. I thought about my response when reading with Ellora. I heard what Ms. Hurt thought. I’ve been asking the same question for more than a decade. I’ve heard hundreds of educators reply in the same way, in grocery stores, on the sidelines of soccer fields and seated at wedding receptions, too.

What if we’re doing real harm with our tunnel vision focus on testing? What if we’re selling our soul in return for transient scores? What if we’re ripping the heart out of our children’s educations? What if we’re all playing a small part in a tragedy not of our making—but a tragedy, nonetheless?

*

I think this might be the most profound statement about standardized testing I’ve seen in some time. It comes from a veteran educator, Jennifer Ballard Pinkowski, who taught Secondary English for several years. She has spent the last seven years working in Special Education:

Want to hate these tests even more? Watch students with Specific Learning Disabilities take them.

You see, these students still have to take the grade level tests their age indicates, not what the content they are learning on their IEP indicates. So they sit, hour after hour, frustrated, angry, discouraged, bitter, frightened, but sometimes, occasionally, still trying to do their best. It’s exhausting and heartbreaking and I hate it with the fire of a thousand suns. I hate the politicians who jam it down our throats every stinking year and claim it’s for the greater good. I hate the state education officials who buy into that garbage.

And I HATE having to inflict this pain on my students.

I wonder. How long is it going to be until teachers, administrators and support personnel all band together and say, “Enough is enough. We’re not doing this to young people anymore. Enough.”

I think if people like Ms. Swanger and Ms. Pinkowski—who clearly put children first—have had their fill, something is seriously, seriously, seriously wrong.

I pray Ellora's kindergarten teacher next year will try to do what Ms. Swanger did.
I don't believe my granddaughter's success in life will boil down to a few test scores at all.

Amanda's Art Project vs. Standardized Tests

 I retired from teaching in 2008, after 33 rewarding years in the classroom. I’ve said this before: but I can’t name five kids in all those years that I didn’t like (although I admit some were easier to like than others).

Certainly, I found that great abilities were sometimes masked and did all I could to bring talent to the fore. In days of yore—before standardized testing spread like kudzu across the educational land—one way to bring hidden talent to view was to offer students all kinds of options in their work. You need not worry whether or not they could provide answers to abstruse questions on a mandated test every spring. Rather, you encouraged teens to develop an array of abilities. 

You tried to foster a love of learning that might be carried forward through life.

By 2008, I had been teaching Ancient World History, as required by State of Ohio guidelines formulated to meet growing testing requirements. We were required, in one year, to cover twenty-eight centuries of world history (1000 B.C. to 1750 A.D.), from China to Europe to Aztec and African lands. Students would be tested at year’s end and success would be measured by answers to fifty questions on one test.

I told my principal at the time, I considered this “educational malpractice.” Her hands, too, were increasingly tied and she only grimaced in response.

I worried about the future of education in those days. I worry even more, nine years removed. From what I hear from younger teachers today the pedagogical kudzu has been impossible to stop.

So here’s an example of what I was still able to do—barely—in the last years before I retired from teaching. I had re-read the Iliad a few years before and realized seventh graders might actually enjoy a synopsis of the story, if I could put it together right. I felt some would enjoy the war story. I thought others would like the love story involved. I also believed exposure to great writing might rub off and help my students learn to express themselves with greater facility. I was almost certain the State of Ohio wouldn’t include a question about Homer or the Iliad on any spring test.

I just didn’t care.

It took long hours to put together a reading of more than 6,000 words; but I was happy to put in the time for a good cause. I had recently read Xenophon, too, because that’s what good teachers do. They always seek to broaden their knowledge base.

For that reason, my synopsis started with a quote from Xenophon about the fate of cities that fell to invaders: “It is a law established for all time among all men that when a city is taken in war, the persons and property of its inhabitants belong to the captors.” 

*

The Iliad opens after ten long years of war and students quickly realized figures in the story acted like people they knew today. Agamemnon was petty. Achilles was a hot-tempered killing machine. Paris is a handsome narcissist, Helen the ancient world equivalent of a Victoria’s Secret model.

At one point, Achilles, face black with rage over unfair treatment at the hands of his king, storms out of a meeting, but not before calling Agamemnon a “wine sack with a dog’s eyes [and]…a deer’s heart.”

From the first, students seemed interested when we dived into the story; and I was sure my plan was working the following day when I heard one boy say in jest that his friend was a “wine sack with a dog’s eyes” while they waited in a cafeteria line for a lunch lady to pass them slices of pepperoni pizza.

When students were reading, I told them not to worry about all the names of Greek and Trojan warriors. I only hoped they might develop a sense of the horrors of war, whether millennia ago or ten thousand miles away in Iraq in 2008. In scene after scene, Homer describes the carnage in vivid detail. The warrior Pedaios meets death:

…the son of Phyleus, the spear-famed, closing upon him

struck him with the sharp spear behind the head at the tendon,

and straight on through the teeth and under the tongue cut the bronze

             blade,

and he dropped in the dust gripping in his teeth the cold bronze.

I felt scenes like that might stick in teen minds.

To cap the unit I explained that we would soon be putting together a comic play, loosely based on Homer’s story. It was an idea I stole from my good friend and colleague Jeff Sharpless, whose classes were also reading my synopsis. Eventually, Mr. Sharpless and I were able to get fifty students to stay after school to practice for roles in the play, to make props, and work on songs for a “Greek chorus.”

Mr. Sharpless and I both asked students to complete several projects during a school year; and work on the play counted as one. Naturally, not every student likes to perform and Amanda, a quiet but talented young lady asked if she could do an art project based on the Iliad instead. Amanda was a creative thinker, diligent in all her work, and I immediately give permission to go ahead.

I was right—at the end of the year—and the State of Ohio had nothing to say about Homer or the Iliad or the carnage of war, ancient or modern, on the state social studies test. And, in a world where measuring learning according to A, B, C and D tests was taking over, no play could matter, and no art project either.

Still, I would have said nine years ago, and still say today, a project like Amanda’s is what true learning is about.

Here are her water color drawings and descriptions based on the Iliad by Homer. I think you can probably guess her grade: 

Agamemnon must give up Chryseis, asking for someone else’s spoils. Achilles calls him greedy. This makes the king angry, telling Achilles he must lose Briseis.

[Both men had taken beautiful Trojan women as prizes during earlier fighting. Now to placate the gods, the king must give up his prize. He takes Achilles’ woman in a fit of anger. Achilles, the greatest of all warriors, refuses to help in the fight any longer.]

Helen decides to watch the fight. Priam tells her, “I do not blame you. I blame the gods.”

[Priam is Troy’s king. Paris had stolen Helen from Menelaus, Agamemnon’s brother.]

Paris leaps from the ranks of the Trojans, wearing a leopard skin. Menelaus accepts his challenge.

[Paris and Menelaus have agreed that whoever wins the fight can take Helen and the war will end.]

Pendaros shot an arrow from behind his friends’ shields. The arrow brushes Menelaus.

[This shot by a Trojan archer breaks the agreement and a general slaughter begins again.]

Diomedes’ spear pierces Aphrodite’s hand and immortal blood flows. He warns her to leave the battle.

[Gods and goddesses often intervene in the fight; in this case the goddess of love is wounded!]

Odysseus visits Achilles. He offers the warrior a cup of wine and goes over the situation. Achilles will not return to the battle.

Patroklos, dressed in Achilles’ armor, throws a stone at Hector’s chariot driver. The man’s skull caves in.

[Patroklos, Achilles’ dear young friend, tries to save the Greeks as they are driven back by the Trojans. He dresses in Achilles’ armor to bolster Greek spirits.]

Paris releases one of his arrows. The missile strikes Diomedes’ foot, going through to the ground.

Odysseus and Diomedes capture a Trojan named Dolon. They question him and he begs for his life. Diomedes severs Dolon’s head from his shoulders.

Achilles mourns Patroklos. He calls himself “a useless weight upon the ground.”

[Hector kills Patroklos in battle while Achilles sulks. Achilles now vows revenge.]

Andromache [Hector’s wife] tries to convince Hector to stay in Troy. He says he must not flee from the fight. Andromache is heartbroken.

Hector and Achilles meet. Hector loses his nerve and runs around the walls of Troy.

The spear of Achilles was driven into Hector’s neck. The dying man pleads for his body to be given to his father for proper burial. Achilles scorns his wish.

Achilles puts holes in Hector’s feet. He drags the body around in his chariot.

Even after his revenge, Achilles finds no peace. He paces along the beach at night.

[Priam sneaks into the enemy camp in the dark and begs for the return of his son Hector’s corpse; Achilles relents.]

Hector is placed on a towering pyre of logs. He is respectfully burned. This ends the Iliad.

*

And that is how you could teach, and how a student could still learn, in an era before school reformers strangled true learning in ropes of tests. 

The Scores Are In: School Reformers Earn F's

Test results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called “the Nation’s Report Card,” are out again this month. And now we know. Now we know what happens when arrogant reformers set out to improve the nation’s schools, contributing only hot air—their opinions—their plans—their pontificating—but not their deeds. (These people don’t teach. They talk. They talk and talk and talk.)

Now we know what happens when people who feel they’re too important to actually work with children bulldoze millions of front line educators who do. We know what happens when they insist on spending billions on standardized testing, because they believe the key to improving learning outcomes is piling up data.

Well, the data is in and reformers score a big red “F.”

More on the damning data later. First, the background: We are now deep into the second decade of misguided education reform. And the basic premise of all this reform has never changed. Men and women like Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, billionaire Bill Gates and Wendy Kopp of Teach for America decided if front line teachers and administrators could be punished enough then student test scores would soar. These reformers and their political allies were positive. If teacher pay was tied to test results, if unions were crushed, if tenure could be denied to every man, woman and beast, scores would surge!

In fact, the fundamental premise of all this reforming could be reduced to one balloon filled with hot air. It wasn’t quite as blunt as Shakespeare—to paraphrase: “First thing we do, let’s kill all the teachers.” Still, it was close.

First, Congress passed No Child Left Behind, offering up a promise that all children would be proficient in reading and math by 2014. Congress did nothing to help children achieve these goals, but made sure, if children didn’t, educator’s heads would roll. The states followed suit, passing hundreds of laws designed to hold teachers “accountable.” (More educators’ heads were meant to roll.) Secretary Duncan put it simply. “It’s all about the talent,” he said. It was all about teachers. Everything would be great—if only we had better teachers and administrators in our schools.

Today, it’s time to consider what fruits the reformers produced. We know Congress was forced to rewrite No Child Left Behind, which failed in epic fashion. We know giant testing companies walked away with billions of dollars. Even the boldest reformers were obliged to admit that tests tied to No Child Left Behind produced slim results. Yet, they never blinked. They blamed front line educators for the failure of their great plans. They insisted grandiose schemes would work if only testing companies tried again. The companies should start over, come up with new tests, gather new data, and yet more heads would roll.

True. Here and there, reformers could point to gains, however spurious they proved to be. Yes. Reading and math scores at the third and eighth grade levels rose. (That’s pretty much what any real teacher would expect if you pummeled school children with test prep lessons for weeks on end every year.) Also true: high school graduation rates improved. Yet, as we will see, the new graduates seemed to know less than the old graduates did, in days when educators were free to do as they saw fit.

Meanwhile, years of abuse served to demoralize the men and women who were truly devoting their lives to helping children. Instead of more resources, they got paperwork to complete. Every teacher, every counselor, psychologist and principal knew the added paperwork ate away at the time they had to help children. In many schools, particularly low-income communities, teachers were required to read scripts—a joyless approach—to prove they were actually teaching.

Reformers and politicians claimed it would help if state and federal bureaucrats had more data. This data would then confirm what they believed: Most teachers were terrible. The data would prove America’s educators deserved to be shot, broken on racks, or run over by school buses. What really happened, of course, was that millions of teachers and administrators, all the excellent ones, and all the good ones—the kind who predominate in every school—ended up wasting days and weeks filling out forms and checking boxes.

Unfortunately, real learning, which is like chess, was stunted or curtailed. The “game” of learning was reduced to tic-tac-toe.

Now we learn that only sour fruit can grow in sour soil. Educators were admonished and threatened. You had better play tic-tac-toe. If you know what’s good for you, you had best forgo any thought of chess. Within narrow limits, then, test scores did improve. In a broader sense, reform failed completely. If anyone cared to look, they might have seen that ACT scores, which measure readiness of high school graduates to do college-level work, didn’t budge at all. SAT scores, proof of what fruits reform had grown, declined slowly but steadily every year.

Now we have fresh data from NAEP. We have the data we need to measure the reformers’ success. It is now possible to say, conclusively, that these egotistical fools have earned an “F” for meddling in the schools.

Scores from NAEP are out again for 2015. Did they soar? Did they surge? Were the latest NAEP scores swell?

Not at all! Averages in both reading and math declined, compared to 2013, the last time NAEP gave its tests. Worse, the percentage of students ready for college-level work dropped. In 2013, 39 percent were ready for college-level math, 38 percent for college-level reading. Last year scores dipped to 37 percent in both areas. Worst of all, students at the bottom, clustered in low-income schools, the kind of young people that reformers swore they knew how to save, suffered most from being force fed years of test preparation. The number of students scoring below “basic” in both reading and math increased from 2013.

In other words, tens of billions of dollars had been devoted to massive school reform. Most of the money went to testing companies, company executives, or passed through lobbyist’s hands to self-serving politicians, or to school reform experts who gave high-priced speeches, and to pay bureaucrats to gather, tally and study all the data.

What happened in real classrooms across the land? Hundreds of millions of hours of teachers’ and students’ time was totally wasted on test preparation. More hundreds of millions of hours had to be devoted to bubbling in answers or filling out forms.

Yet, scores didn’t surge.

Scores were stagnant. Or worse. On the NAEP tests, seniors scored an average of 152 in math (out of 300) in 2015. In 2005, the average was 150. All those insults hurled at educators, all those heads that rolled, all those bold plans, all those big words from people who only talked, never taught, all those hours of testing crammed down the throats of children, and all we had to show for it was an improvement of two measly points.

Ah, but it was far worse!

In 2015 the average American high school senior scored 287 (out of 500) on the reading portion of the NAEP tests. That was down five points, from 287 in 1992.

Fifteen years wasted—and almost nothing has been done to help children who suffer most outside of school, those, in turn, who struggle most in any classroom. In fact, reformers have argued that what happens outside of schools doesn’t matter—have insisted educators who claim it does (because it does) are making “excuses.” Certainly, the politicians failed miserably, as they often do. Rather than help the youth of the nation, they passed legislation which served to stifle the joys of learning. The reformers and the politicians made the jobs of educators harder and made the school days of children much, much worse.

Today, the grades are in: “F’s” across the board for the reformers and their pals.

***

I MAKE THE SAME KIND OF ARGUMENTS AT LENGTH IN MY NEW BOOK, NOW AVAILABLE AT AMAZON.COM.

OR YOU CAN DROP ME AN EMAIL AT VILEJJV@YAHOO.COM AND I CAN TELL YOU HOW TO GET A COPY.

Read what a few reviewers have said so far.

Front cover.

If You Write about Education, Shouldn't You Talk to Educators?

Sometimes, you have to wonder. 

Do the people who write about American education ever talk to educators? And do they know they should?

Those questions came to mind again when I read “The Education Assassins,” a recent editorial in The New York Times.

The title was slick and hooked my attention. Luckily, no actual bullets flew, but it turned out there were those who hoped to eliminate the U. S. Department of Education.

Typically, the author, Frank Bruni, made mocking reference to Governor Rick Perry, who wanted to eliminate the Department, but couldn't remember which one. Common Core was also mentioned. Readers learned that Jeb Bush was for Common Core. Senator Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat made a cameo appearance in the column. So did Lamar Alexander, former U. S. Secretary of Education, now, like Murray, interested in reducing the Department's sway. 

Indeed, if Ms. Murray and Mr. Alexander have their way, new legislation might hamstring Mr. Duncan. 

“There’d be no federal say, for example, in how (or if) public schoolteachers are evaluated. If the bill passes—and it has significant bipartisan support—the department would be a shadow of itself,” Mr. Bruni warned.

Naturally, he talked to several school reformers, none of whom ever taught, to get insights for his editorial. And what story about U. S. education would be complete without Joel I. Klein adding a bit of folksy wisdom? Without federal involvement, the former chancellor of the New York City Schools insisted, “Some states will do good stuff, but there will also be laggards and a lot of happy talk.”

I found myself thinking: “Who knows ‘happy talk’ better than Mr. Klein?” (He certainly knows very little about teaching.)

When Mr. Klein ran the NYC schools he routinely faulted teachers. He insisted “grading schools” was key to improvement. He was all for charter schools, never realizing charter schools might drain off capable students, leaving kids with disadvantages concentrated in neighborhood schools.

Mr. Klein never realized this might happen because Mr. Klein is a lawyer by trade, hired by a billionaire mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg (who never taught) to run the schools. Certainly, Mayor Bloomberg’s attitude was clear. He once said the problem in education was that we no longer hired teachers from the top of their college classes. They came from the bottom twenty percent, “and not of the best schools.”

Yes. Teachers were the problem. Sure, sure. Sure they were.

At this point, I began to ponder some of the myriad problems every frontline educator can see. I thought back to poor Mike, who missed 106 days of class in one year, not because he was sick but because his mother allowed it, when I had him in seventh grade. I thought about how, while Klein and Bloomberg were spending their days bashing teachers and hatching plans to increase the weight of standardized test scores in determining teacher pay, they missed an obvious obstacle.

That is: 200,000 New York City students, roughly 1 in 5, missed a month or more of classes every year.

Nevertheless, I kept reading. I was praying Mr. Bruni might talk to a real teacher or principal or school counselor. Several think tank reformers were quoted. A politician called Duncan “a helpful voice” during his six years as head of the Department of Education. 

Again, I found myself wondering: “Duncan? The poor man hasn’t strung two sentences together in six long years to indicate he has any idea what challenges frontline educators face.”

What, then, does Mr. Bruni miss in the end?

He misses what almost all writers about education today miss. No one asks educators who survived the slaughter at Sandy Hook how much “grading schools” might have helped on that sanguine day. 

No one talks to the principal at my wife’s old school about tying teacher pay to test scores, and how that might compare to being chased from her building by a knife-wielding, schizophrenic mother. 

No one offers suggestions for what frontline educators might do to aid the 6,000,000 children who are victims of abuse and neglect every year in the United States. 

No one goes into a tough Chicago neighborhood, where Mr. Duncan once ran the schools, and asks teachers, “What help could you use in meeting the needs of teens who happen to be gang members?”

No one ever asks.

I spent thirty-three years with the Loveland City Schools, a highly-regarded system, just outside Cincinnati. And if the Department of Education ever did anything to help me or help my peers or help students, I am not aware of it. The bureaucrats, politicians and reformers talk blithely about what educators must do.

They never talk to educators.

They don’t talk to Chris Burke, now principal at Loveland Middle School, and an educator I greatly respect, who says increased standardized testing has been detrimental, forcing his staff to spend nineteen days on test administration this year. “It’s all about compliance,” he tells me, with a hint of resignation. He mentions, to my surprise, that 35% of seventh graders at LMS opted out this year.

Katie Rose and Jenn Ramage, two dedicated young teachers, join the conversation, calling the testing process “nuts.”

“Nineteen days,” Katie exclaims. “Can you believe it? And forget Reconstruction [which the curriculum says she should cover at year’s end]. I only had one day left to cover the Civil War.”

Her disgust in the face of all this piddling interference with real attempts to educate teens is clear.

I’ve been working on a book about teaching for some time, myself. And I keep asking every teacher or retired principal or counselor I meet what they think about the direction we’re headed. I try to pose one question in the most neutral tone possible: “Do you think all the testing and recent changes in education have enhanced learning, hurt learning, or had, basically, a neutral effect?”

At a wedding in California a few weeks ago, I sat down beside a woman who turned out to be a retired elementary school principal. When I got to the word “hurt” in my usual query she interrupted. 

“HURT,” she said emphatically. “Does anyone say anything else?”

I laughed and said she had to let me finish. “But, to be honest, no,” I admitted. “They don’t.”

That’s what those who write about education might discover if they ever took time to ask. The growing backlash against testing, the bitter disdain for Mr. Duncan among frontline educators (the NEA called for his resignation in 2014), the willingness to shut down the U. S. Department of Education, these are not matters of mere politics.

These issues affect educators and the children they deal with every day.

When I asked Jeane Weisbrod, my old friend, who retired recently after a career in Loveland, she told me me she resented all the testing because it meant “sacrifice of valuable instructional time.”

I was talking with current staff members, and retirees, during a ceremony to honor Jeane and Diane Sullivan, a retiring art teacher, and Ora Sue Peabody, a fine school secretary, who was hanging up the phone for good in July. 

Jane Barre, former Loveland Middle School principal, called the metastasizing testing burden “lunacy” when I asked her opinion. Jane went on to serve as assistant superintendent for another local district after she left Loveland. When she began that job testing took up ten percent of her time. By 2009, testing ate up half her day, making it hard to accomplish anything else of substance. Diane chimed in to say she felt sorry for younger teachers who would have to deal with this mess for years to come. Like Diogenes, but stopping occasionally to sample the brownies, I was looking for anyone who felt our “leaders” in Washington knew what they were doing. Sue Lundy and Lauren Cripe, two of the best educators I ever knew (Sue is retired; Lauren just finished her tenth year) agreed all the testing was terrible. 

Sue called it “crazy.”

So, there you have it. That’s what Mr. Bruni missed. Those who work with children, or have worked with children, believe Secretary Duncan and the politicians have absolutely led us down the wrong path. 

They believe learning has suffered harm.

In fact, if we want to help children, here’s what we might do. Take part of the $70 billion spent by the Department of Education every year. Hire more counselors and more psychologists to work directly with kids. Get creative if you want to aid our nation’s youth. Take $20 billion and award $20,000 college scholarships to a million high school seniors every year. Use another $20 billion to help 1.6 million children who experience homelessness, who suffer both in and out of school. 

That would provide $12,500 in good housing for each child.

I think real educators, those in the academic trenches, could come up with all kinds of ways to use money and manpower to improve the lives of the boys and girls they work with every day. Arne Duncan? Let him go into a classroom in an inner city Chicago school. Let him work with teens in gangs.

Joel I. Klein? Let him have a chance to teach, too. He can work with kids who've been sexually abused at home and see how much “grading schools” matters.

If Mr. Bruni were to ask me, or ask most of my old colleagues and friends, what we thought about the Department of Education, I suspect most of us would say, “Sure. Scrap it. And scrap all the standardized tests.”

Those tests cost $1.7 billion annually.

I’d tell him: “Take that money and divide it among 17,000,000 elementary school students. Let each child take $100 to the nearest book store. Let them buy books—and see if reading scores don’t go up faster than they have in the last fifteen years, despite this absurd fetish for all the standardized tests.”

If nothing else, if you are writing about education, start by talking to people who actually do the educating. 

Spend more money on books. That might help students improve reading scores.

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If you liked this post, you might like my book about teaching, Two Legs Suffice, now available on Amazon.

Or contact me at vilejjv@yahoo.com and I can probably send you a copy direct for a little bit cheaper. My book is meant to be a defense of all good teachers and a clear explanation of what good teachers can do, and what they cannot do.

Two Legs Suffice is also about what students, parents and others involved in education must do if we want to truly enhance learning.

I actually taught for 33 years, more than all nine U. S. Secretaries of Education, Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Stephen Brill and about a hundred more “school reformers” combined.

Yep. Combined!