Peter Greene listened to a podcast produced by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and made a shocking discovery: One of the leading figures of the reform movement–Checker Finn–acknowledged that after 20 years of reform, there was no change!
Archives for category: Testing
Christopher Cotton is an English teacher at Shaker Heights High School in Ohio. He wrote this essay, which appears on his union’s Facebook page.
CRUNCHED BY THE NUMBERS
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and data.
— Mark Twain (actually, Twain said “statistics,” not “data,” but it’s close enough)
The Ohio Department of Education has given us an F in “Gap Closing” (which is pretty much what my wife gave me after I attempted to insulate the house before a particularly cold and drafty winter). The sweaty toilers of the ODE engine room shoveled our numbers into the great cruncher. The digits tumbled into the spinning teeth of its mighty algorithms. It chewed, it cogitated, it spat out a judgment. Shaker: F.
First of all, I’d like to point out that 86 percent of Ohio’s 608 school districts flunked this category. If we teachers gave a test that 86 percent of our students failed, we would assume there was something wrong with the test. But this percentage is a political, not educational decision.
In any case, the data makes us look bad. Or does it? It all depends on how you chew it. For example, our African-American and Economically Disadvantaged (ED) kids, the ones on the lower tier of our gap, scored better than the white kids in Cleveland and in several other Ohio districts. Where’s your gap now, ODE? Our ED kids performed vastly better than the same demographic groups—regardless of race—around the state and around the country. Might that be a sign of something we’re doing right?
The problem is that no matter how well the lower tier of our gap performs, it’s being compared to a group whose numbers are severely distorted by our very top-performing kids. The district rightly boasts about our graduates who are Presidential Scholars, National Merit Semi-Finalists, Ivy Leaguers, etc. etc. But the exceptional number of these exceptional students is proof not that we’re great educators, but that we have a freakish concentration of freakishly smart kids. According to “Measuring What Matters,” we are the 17th most educated community in the nation. That puts us squarely in freak territory: the top tenth of the top one percent of the 40,000 American cities and towns. We have many kids who come from families in which not only both parents have advanced degrees, but all four grandparents went to college. Most of these kids are going to be good students. Many will be superstars. And when you throw high income into the mix, the superstars are issued capes and wrist web-shooters and bullet-deflecting bracelets.
We do a tremendous disservice to our students—in any disaggregated group—when we compare them to these outliers. If we want to construe any meaningful lessons from the data, we ought to toss out these off-the-chart scores before we do any calculations.
We often hear something like this: “We can close the achievement gap, because we are Shaker.” I would put it the other way around: We can’t close the achievement gap, because we are Shaker—a community with extreme inequalities in income and family educational background. Certainly we should work on narrowing the gap. Certainly we must bust our butts every day to narrow the gap. But if we think we can erase it, we’re chasing unicorns.
The gap was not caused by schools; schools can’t make it go away. For one thing, the kids arrive—whether first grade, kindergarten or pre-school—with an achievement gap already firmly in place, already gaping wide. We can create programs for the disadvantaged kids, we can work relentlessly on pulling them upward, but the gap may not budge. This is because the advantages don’t stop pouring in for the advantaged kids: nightly book readings, educational toys, museum memberships, tutors, psychologists, painting lessons, pottery classes, iPads, cameras, chemistry sets, horses, hockey teams, telescopes, cello camps, complete sets of Harry Potter. The parents not only understand the homework, they have the time to help with it—and also with the dioramas, book-binding, mousetrap-powered cars, baking soda volcanoes. As they get older, the disadvantaged kids get more and more opportunities in Shaker. I’m proud of all the programs that our district sponsors to help these kids. The energy and money we put into these problems are exemplary. But advantaged kids also get wonderful opportunities in school. And on the weekend they go to Shakespeare plays; when there’s a day off they shadow their parents at the Cleveland Clinic; for spring break they go scuba diving in Costa Rica; over the summer they tour the museums of Europe.
Our achievement gap not only doesn’t close over the 12 years of schooling, it grows slightly wider. And here we make another serious mistake when we interpret the data. We assume that, if we were a truly equitable district, the data would show it by having a gap that decreased, or at worst, held steady. But this assumes that learning is a straight, upward-slanting line, a steady accumulation of knowledge and skills. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the brain educates itself: not by inputting information, but by loading software. Growth is exponential. The more you learn, the better you get at learning. You learn faster; you retain more; your brain makes new connections and quantum leaps. Our achievement gap widens only slightly over the school years in Shaker, and this is a genuine achievement.
It appears that our district has begun to supplant the term “achievement gap” with “opportunity gap.” I haven’t heard the rationale for this decision, but it seems to me that we are reaching for whips with which to flagellate ourselves. “Opportunity gap” implies that the fault lies squarely with us: for surely we control what opportunities we give our students. But it is our society that has an opportunity gap. And this colossal injustice manifests itself in schools as an achievement gap.
What the data shows us is that, in our little community, we’re doing a damn good job at battling an epic problem—a problem as wide as the nation and as deep as the most hidden and poorly understood mechanisms of the human mind. A problem as old as the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. Before that, the data is kinda murky.
I am certainly not advocating complacency. I’m not saying we should stop trying to close the gap. We should strive with every fiber of our teaching souls to reach and engage and inspire the kids on the lower tier of our gap. The obstacles in front of them are a monstrous injustice.
But when we hold ourselves to the impossible benchmarks of the ODE, when we hold up illusions as our standards, we not only set ourselves up for failure and recriminations, but we do a real disservice to the kids we want to help. For some of these kids are truly brilliant, some of them are pushing themselves to the limit, day in and day out, some of them are walking miracles. And are we telling them that no matter how hard they work, no matter how high they achieve, it’s not enough?
The failing state report card has led to a lot of hand-wringing in the district, and some urgent communication to parents. But—can I tell you a secret? This is one hell of a good school system. We know it; most of the community knows it. Personally, I’m proud to be a Shaker teacher. I’m humbled by the work of my colleagues. The only message we need to send regarding the news from Columbus is to the ODE itself: take your report card and shove it where the data don’t shine.
There. I feel better already. And now I need to get back to work.
Chris Cotton,
SHHS English Teacher
SHTA Member
Gary Rubinstein was curious about how students in the Success Academy high school fared on the mandatory state Regents examinations. He called and called to state offices, but he got a run-around. Two days after he blogged about it, he learned the answer to his question: Success Academy, which is celebrated for producing high test scores, has an exemption from the state so its high school students do not have to take the Regents exams required of all others. (The only exception to the mandate is a group of small, project-based schools called The Consortium schools, who offer portfolio assessments instead of state tests; they received an exemption about 20 years ago.)
Eva Moskowitz, the CEO of the SA charter chain, receives millions of dollars from benefactors every year in recognition of the high test scores of her charters.
Success Academy has gotten so much attention (and money) for their high 3-8 test scores that it is only natural to wonder how the few older students they have in their schools have fared after 8th grade. One thing we know is that Success Academy eighth graders have not done well on the specialized high school entrance exam to gain admissions to one of the eight specialized high schools. They have had three cohorts of students take the entrance exam and the first two cohorts had no students gain admission and the third cohort had six students out of two hundred eligible gain admission to one of the eight specialized high schools.
Rubinstein found this very puzzling: Why would a school that prided itself on turning students into “little test-taking machines” avoid the Regents exams? He has a few theories about that. Read his post to find out what he believes explains this special case of avoiding the required tests.
I wrote an article for the online version of the Chronicle of Philanthropy about how the big foundations paved the way for Betsy DeVos’ nihilistic campaign to privatize public education. I wanted it to be in a journal that foundations across the nation read. It is available only to subscribers.
https://www.philanthropy.com/article/Opinion-Blame-Big-Foundations/238662
Opinion: Blame Big Foundations for Assault on Public Education
By Diane Ravitch
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to reallocate $20 billion in federal funds to promote charter schools and private-school vouchers. He has selected Michigan billionaire Betsy DeVos — who has long devoted her philanthropic efforts to advocating for charters and vouchers — as the next secretary of education. After the election, her American Federation for Children boasted of spending nearly $5 million on candidates that support school choice, not public schools.
Currently, 80 percent of charter schools in Michigan are run by for-profit corporations, due in no small part to Ms. DeVos and her husband, Amway heir Dick DeVos. These schools represent a $1 billion industry that produces results no better than do public schools, according to a yearlong Detroit Free Press investigation. The DeVoses recently made $1.45 million in campaign contributions to Michigan lawmakers who blocked measures to hold charters accountable for performance or financial stability.
With Ms. DeVos in charge of federal education policy, the very future of public education in the United States is at risk. How did we reach this sorry state? Why should a keystone democratic institution be in jeopardy?
I hold foundations responsible.
Extremist Attacks
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Edythe and Eli Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation have promoted charter schools and school choice for the past decade. They laid the groundwork for extremist attacks on public schools. They legitimized taxpayer subsidies for privately managed charters and for “school choice,” which paved the way for vouchers. (Indeed, as foundations spawned thousands of charter schools in the past decade, nearly half of the states endorsed voucher programs.)
At least a dozen more foundations have joined the Big Three, including the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, and the Doris & Donald Fisher Fund.
For years these groups have argued that, one, public schools are “failing”; two, we must save poor children from these failing schools; three, they are failing because of bad teachers; four, anyone with a few weeks of training can teach as well, or better. It’s a simple, easily digestible narrative, and it’s wrong.
To begin with, our public schools are not failing. Where test scores are low, there is high poverty and concentrated racial segregation. Test scores in affluent and middle-income communities are high. The U.S. rank on international standardized tests has been consistent (and consistently average) since those tests began being offered in the 1960s, but the countries with higher scores never surpassed us economically.
The big foundations refused to recognize the limitations of standardized testing and its correlation with family income. Look at SAT scores: Students whose families have high incomes do best; those from impoverished families have the lowest scores. The foundations choose to ignore the root causes of low test scores and instead blame the teachers at schools in high-poverty areas.
Follow the Money
Major foundations put their philanthropic millions into three strategies:
They funded independently run charter schools, which are a form of privatization.
Some, notably the Gates Foundation, invested in evaluating teachers based on their students’ test scores.
They gave many millions to Teach for America, which undermines the profession by leading young college graduates to think they can be good teachers with only five weeks of training.
Many of the philanthropists behind the foundations have also used their own money to underwrite political candidates and state referenda aimed at advancing charters and school choice. Bill Gates and his allies spent millions to pass a referendum in Washington State authorizing charter schools; it failed three times before winning in 2012 by 1 percent of the vote. After the state Supreme Court denied taxpayer funding to charters, on the grounds that they are not public schools because they are not overseen by elected school boards, three justices who joined the majority ruling faced electoral challengers bankrolled by Mr. Gates and his friends. (The incumbents easily won re-election.)
The Walton Family Foundation claims to have launched one-quarter of the charter schools in the District of Columbia. It has pledged to spend $200 million annually for at least the next five years on opening new charters. Individual family members have spent millions on pro-school choice candidates and ballot questions. This year they joined other out-of-state billionaires like Michael Bloomberg in contributing $26 million to support a Massachusetts referendum that would authorize a dozen new charters a year, indefinitely. It lost, 62 percent to 38 percent. Only 16 of the state’s 351 school districts voted “yes”; the “no vote” was strongest in districts that already had charters, which parents knew were draining resources from their public schools.
Advocates for charter schools insist they are public schools — except when charters are brought into court or before the National Labor Relations Board, in which case they claim to be private corporations, not state actors. They do share in public funding for education, a pie that has not gotten bigger for a decade. So every new charter school takes money away from traditional public schools, requiring them to increase class sizes, lay off teachers, and cut programs.
Charters have a mixed performance record. Those with the highest test scores are known for cherry-picking their students, excluding those with severe disabilities and English-language learners, and pushing out students who are difficult to teach or who have low test scores.
Many other charters have abysmal academic records. The worst are the virtual charters, which have high attrition rates, low test scores, and low graduation rates. As The New York Times recently reported, citing federal data, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow in Ohio has “more students drop out … or fail to finish high school within four years than at any other school in the country.”
Why do state leaders allow such “schools” to exist?
Follow the campaign contributions to key legislators.
Failing the Test
The Gates Foundation’s crusade to evaluate teachers by the test scores of their students has been a colossal failure, one from which the organization has yet to back off. (Unlike its $2 billion campaign to encourage smaller high schools, which the foundation admitted in 2008 had not succeeded.)
This has had devastating consequences. President Obama’s Education Department, which had close ties to the Gates Foundation, required states to adopt this untested way of evaluating teachers to be eligible for $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funding.
Since the standardized tests covered only mathematics and reading, some states, like Florida, began rating teachers based on the scores of students they didn’t teach in subjects they didn’t teach.
In New York State, a highly regarded fourth-grade teacher in an affluent suburb sued over her low rating and won a judgment that the state’s method, based on the Gates precept, was “arbitrary and capricious.” When newspapers in Los Angeles and New York City published invalid ratings of thousands of teachers, classroom morale plummeted and veteran educators resigned in protest. One in Los Angeles committed suicide.
The American Statistical Association issued a strong critique of the use of student scores to rate teachers, since scores vary depending on which students are assigned to teachers. The American Educational Research Association also spoke out against the Gates Foundation’s method, saying that those who teach English-language learners and students with disabilities would be unfairly penalized.
Still, big donors were so sure teachers were responsible for low test scores that they fell in love with Teach for America and showered hundreds of millions of dollars on it.
The nonprofit began as a good idea: Invite young college graduates to teach for two years where no teachers were readily available, sort of like the Peace Corps. But then the organization began making absurd claims that its young recruits could “transform” the lives of poor students and even close the achievement gap between children who are rich and poor, white and black. School districts, looking to save money, began replacing experienced teachers with Teach for America recruits, who became the hard-working, high-turnover staff at thousands of new charter schools.
Due in part to that supply of cheap labor, 93 percent of charters are nonunion, which the retail billionaires of the DeVos and Walton families no doubt see as a boon. Unfortunately, Teach for America undermines the teaching profession by asserting that five weeks of training is equivalent to a year or two of professional education. Would doctors or lawyers ever permit untrained recruits to become Heal for America or Litigate for America? It is only the low prestige of the teaching profession that enables it to be so easily infiltrated by amateurs, who mean well but are usually gone in two or three years.
Now that the Trump administration means to use the power and purse of the federal government to replace public schools with private alternatives, it is important to remember that universal public education under democratic control has long been one of the hallmarks of our democracy. No high-performing nation in the world has turned its public schools over to the free market.
Let us remember that public schools were established to prepare young people to become responsible citizens. In addition to teaching knowledge and skills, they are expected to teach character and ethical behavior. Gates, Broad, and other big foundations have forgotten that public education is a public responsibility, not a consumer good. Their grant-making strategies have endangered public education.
This is a time to hope that they will recognize their errors, take a stand against privatization of our public services, and commit themselves to rebuilding public education and civil society.
Diane Ravitch is a historian of education and a research professor at New York University. She writes about education policy at Diane Ravitch’s Blog.
Renee Dudley of Reuters has dug deep into a story that seldom reaches public view: the internal battle inside the College Board–sponsor of the SAT–that followed the arrival of David Coleman.
Or, how the architect of the Common Core imposed his “beautiful vision” on the SAT and created massive disruption inside the organization.
“NEW YORK – Shortly after taking over the College Board in 2012, new CEO David Coleman circulated an internal memo laying out what he called a “beautiful vision.”
“It was his 7,800-word plan for transforming the organization’s signature product, the SAT college entrance exam. The path Coleman laid out was detailed, bold and idealistic – a reflection of his personality, say those who know him.
“Literary passages for the new SAT should be “memorable and often beautiful,” he wrote, and students should be able to take the test by computer.
“Finishing the redesign quickly was essential. If the overhaul were ready by March 2015, he wrote in a later email to senior employees, then the New York-based College Board could win new business and counter the most popular college entrance exam in America, the ACT.
“Perhaps the biggest change was the new test’s focus on the Common Core, the controversial set of learning standards that Coleman himself helped create. The new SAT, he wrote, would “show a striking alignment” to the standards, which set expectations for what American students from kindergarten through high school should learn to prepare for college or a career. The standards have been fully adopted by 42 states and the District of Columbia – and are changing how and what millions of children are taught.
“Redesigning the SAT to reflect the Common Core has solidified Coleman’s influence as one of the most powerful figures in education. He has emerged as “the arbiter of what America’s children should know and be able to do,” Diane Ravitch, former assistant secretary of education for President George H.W. Bush, wrote in her blog.
“But Coleman’s “beautiful vision” for remaking the exam soon met some harsh realities.
“”Internal documents reviewed by Reuters show pitched battles over his timeline to create the new test and whether the push to meet the deadline could backfire.
“The documents, which include memos, emails and presentations, reveal persistent concerns that aligning the redesigned SAT with the Common Core would disadvantage students in states that rejected the standards or were slow to absorb them. The materials also indicate that Coleman’s own decisions delayed the organization’s effort to offer a digital version of the exam.
“Today, less than a year after the new SAT debuted, the College Board continues to struggle with the consequences of Coleman’s crash course to remake the SAT and its companion, the PSAT, a junior version of the exam.”
The question now: what will happen to the Common Core-aligned SAT in the era of Trump, who claims to hate Common Core. If state’s drop Common Core, the SAT may be out on a limb.
Gary Rubinstein wondered: Where are the High School Regents’ exam scores for Success Academy students?
He writes:
“About a year ago I found myself in a snafu of red tape as I attempted to track down the high school test results for the famed Success Academy Charter School Network. Though Success Academy is known for its stellar 3-8 Math and ELA test scores in New York State, much less is known about how students perform after 8th grade.
“One reason for this is that most of the Success Academy schools only have younger students. Of the schools that do have the upper grades, the number of students in each grade is very small because of attrition and Success Academy’s refusal to ‘backfill’ student who leave with other eager students from their mythical waiting list.
“The oldest Success Academy students began the school known as Success Academy Harlem I in 2006 as first graders. At that time there were 73 students in the class of 2018. By 2015 those 73 first graders had dwindled to just 20 tenth graders, down from 26 ninth graders the year before. How many of those 20 students are currently 11th graders in Success Academy is unknown to the public, though that data does get released sometime next year. It’s a safe bet to say that the number of eleventh graders right now is somewhere in the teens.
“High School students in New York State take standardized final exams known as ‘The Regents.’ Students must take these Regents exams to graduate. The ‘college ready’ statistic is based on these Regents exams, and schools are judged on how well their students do on these tests.
“Last year I noticed that unlike the other charter schools, there was no data for the Regents scores at Success Academy on the New York State public data site. I emailed the data department of the state and they said they did not have the data, that Success Academy did not report any data, and that if I want to know those scores my best bet would be to simply call Success Academy and ask them for the scores — something I did not try, though it would have made for an amusing telephone conversation.”
Follow Gary as he searches for the missing test scores. He encounters one blind alley after another. Where are the scores? Is the highest scoring charter school in the state avoiding the tests?
Simon Greenhalgh is assistant principal at the Seoul Foreign School. Most of his professional career has been spent in education in Asia.
In this article, he warns about the hidden costs to students in East Asia of an educational regime that values high test scores above all else that a student might do or accomplish.
The recent TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey) and PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) results have been met with the usual fanfare or damp squib depending on where you reside. The idea to compare countries’ educational systems via standardized tests always seems to be an ill-considered one, and yet every year such rankings keep coming. There are people eagerly awaiting the results to see whether a country did well enough to provide cause for celebration or poorly enough to allow for an onslaught of criticism.
TIMSS and PISA have many critics, not least from leading academics like Yong Zhao at the University of Kansas; but despite their criticisms they are regularly held up by governments to champion or condemn educational practices in their own country – or other countries. Among other things this has led to an unhealthy obsession among educators from all over the world with Finland, whose results, system, and general educational indefatigability has become the hopeful example of a Western nation that can achieve good scores in the face of competition from Asia, without the need for mirroring long hours and encouraging high pressure competition.
This year, in a pattern that is becoming monotonous to follow, the Asia-Pacific has all the real winners, with the TIMSS results showing that Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), and Japan significantly outperformed all other countries. These locations have used their success in these global standardized tests to boast of their educational systems, schools, teachers, and students. On the back of this success, we have witnessed a gentle wooing of the West, where, for example, the U.K. now widely utilizes a Singapore mathematics scheme. Alongside these academic initiatives, we have also been subjected to the unusual spectacle of a number of bizarre and disingenuous exchanges, mostly in the name of entertainment. We have seen, on the BBC no less, British children sent to Chinese schools (it was too hard, the Brits were too rude, and they gave up) and Chinese teachers sent to U.K. schools (the children were too rude and wouldn’t listen, so the teachers gave up).
In a recent follow-up, the BBC covered three Welsh children in South Korean schools and found that the truth is far more complicated than anything a standardized test can show. South Korean children are studying 14 to 16 hours a day to compete, ultimately, in a make-or-break university entrance exam. Welsh children don’t need to do this and they have more free time, which, depending on who you ask, may be a good or a bad thing.
Welsh PISA scores are lower than South Korean ones, but comparing the two is like comparing leeks and kimchi. The Asia-Pacific countries near the top of PISA rankings all feature tough final university entrance exams in highly competitive social environments, whereas Western countries left this behind a long time ago. A key moment in the story of the Welsh children in South Korea came when one of the South Korean children talks about suicides from her peer group due to the pressure coming from family and teachers over the college entrance exam results. How many suicides are worth it so that a country can attain the highest PISA scores?
The BBC, keen to make us laugh at hapless Welsh teenagers trying to mop the floors in a Seoul high school, also makes the more morbid point that South Korea has the highest suicide rate in the industrialized world, plausibly linked to the competitive nature of the society. However, those familiar with the countries that topped the TIMSS and PISA rankings will not be surprised by the suicides, the competitiveness, nor the 14-16 hour days of the students. This is the norm in these countries. This is not the norm in Wales and other Western countries for a reason: a different culture exists….
The real story is that whilst the wealthier Asian countries dominate these tables, the students are paying a price to do so. The long-term implications at an individual level aren’t really known. The stories of children studying until midnight every night and putting in a double shift all weekend are forgotten in the league tables. What does this mean? That the educational systems are not as good or simply that they have a different focus? At the end of the day, comparing apples and orange will never produce a meaningful or fair comparison. Those that want oranges will never agree that apples are better and the apple lovers shouldn’t mimicking orange growers in the hope of getting better apples.
Alan Singer greatly admires President Obama, as do I, except for his disastrous education policies, which laid the groundwork for privatization and deprofessionalization of teaching. Public school educators were scolded again and again by Arne Duncan for their alleged failings and their alleged low standards.
Singer here reviews the Obama record and tries to find something positive to say about the “reform” agenda of the past 15 years. Try as he might, he can’t find much to praise.
Caitlin Emma, Benjamin Wermund, and Kimberly Hefling, staff writers at politico.com, took a close look at Michigan and answered the question, what hath Betsy DeVos’s obsession with choice done to the schools of Michigan?
Unless you are a choice fanatic like DeVos, the answer is not encouraging.
Despite two decades of charter-school growth, the state’s overall academic progress has failed to keep pace with other states: Michigan ranks near the bottom for fourth- and eighth-grade math and fourth-grade reading on a nationally representative test, nicknamed the “Nation’s Report Card.” Notably, the state’s charter schools scored worse on that test than their traditional public-school counterparts, according to an analysis of federal data.
Critics say Michigan’s laissez-faire attitude about charter-school regulation has led to marginal and, in some cases, terrible schools in the state’s poorest communities as part of a system dominated by for-profit operators. Charter-school growth has also weakened the finances and enrollment of traditional public-school districts like Detroit’s, at a time when many communities are still recovering from the economic downturn that hit Michigan’s auto industry particularly hard.
The results in Michigan are so disappointing that even some supporters of school choice are critical of the state’s policies.
“The bottom line should be, ‘Are kids achieving better or worse because of this expansion of choice?’” said Michigan State Board of Education President John Austin, a DeVos critic who also describes himself as a strong charter-school supporter. “It’s destroying learning outcomes … and the DeVoses were a principal agent of that.”
The links are in the article, as well as a puzzle. Check out the link to CREDO at Stanford (funded by the Walton Foundation), which issued a report on Michigan charters and praised them extensively. How does the CREDO finding make sense to Michigan’s low standing on the National Assessment of Education Progress? How does it make sense in light of the fact that Detroit is the worst-performing urban district tested by NAEP?
Marge Borchert was a member of the Blog’s honor roll. She recently died, only months after her retirement as principal of Allendale Elementary School in upstate New York. This is the post where I named her to the honor roll. I did so because of a letter she wrote to the children in her school. Also, because she got a zero growth score after many of her students opted out. She wore her rating as a badge of honor. She loved the children in her school. She was kind. She was a good principal.
This is the letter:
Dear Boys & Girls,
I wanted to write you a letter telling you how very much I enjoyed and continue to enjoy all of the painted rocks that you made. They are a great addition to our beautiful garden. I loved looking at each and every one of them this summer. I stopped to admire them when I checked on the flowers that were planted by your parents. Quite honestly, they brought a smile to my face even on rainy days. The rocks are as unique and colorful as each one of you. Each rock is painted with your own unique story.
The butterfly bush that is growing outside of my office window is blooming, and it is the most beautiful shade of purple that I have ever seen. A ruby throated hummingbird has been visiting that bush every day since it bloomed. I am looking forward to seeing a butterfly visit. The baby sparrows in the birdhouse have learned to fly, and have moved away. The crow that was tormenting the baby rabbits seems to have learned not to poke its beak in their home. Several of us watched in astonishment as the mother rabbit chased after that crow, jumped in the air and batted at that crow with its front paw. This was the first time that I have ever seen such a sport! That mother rabbit had strong protective instincts– just like your moms. We can learn so much by observing nature. Who knew that there was so much to !earn by just taking some time to stop, look, and listen.
So…..by now all of you are wondering why I was inspired to write you such a long letter. It is simply for this reason. I want each and every one of you to know that you inspire me on a daily basis. Each and every one of you is unique and colorful in your own special way. Each of you has a special talent, and you are loved. I intend to hold on to these thoughts when I look at the New York State scores, and I encourage your parents to do the same. The scores are not a true picture of who you are in this world. You can and will bloom when you are ready. You will fly when you are ready. It is entirely up to you to decide what you will grow up to be in life. It all depends on you. Remember the mother rabbit who used her own unique talents and skills to “fear that nasty crow nevermore. ”
In my heart — you truly rock!!! I can’t wait to see you in September!!
Love Always,
Mrs. Borchert
P.S. These are the books that I read this summer:
The Diary of Anne Frank
Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
Recidicide by Kelly Gallagher
The Story Killers by Terrence 0. Moore
David & Goliath by Macolm Gledwell
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Children of the Core by Kris L. Nielsen
The Bible
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