Mind the Gap
By Jill Jenkins
During my last year of teaching
before I retired, it was my pleasure to work with one of my most competent colleague
to prepare our school’s accreditation.
Our research brought some enlightening data about the students who fall
through the achievement gap. Using data
from both the Scholastic Reading Inventory Test, and the STAR test, we learned
that one third of our student body read one or more years above grade level,
one third read on grade level and one third were one or more years below grade
level. Only a small percentage of our
students did not score proficient on the state C. R. T. (Criterion Reference
Test) test with about 80% scoring in the
C.C.R. range (which I thought was Credence Clearwater Revival, but apparently
it means far above proficient). In fact, our school out-performed almost every
school in our district and every middle school in our state. So, what about that two percent who did not
pass their end of the year test? Our
principal decided we should focus all of our efforts on the two percent who
fell through the gap. He wanted us to
mind the gap. Our first question was:
what contributed to their poor performance?
Our research gave us more answers.
We found there were three categories of poor performers: first, were the
students who had been absent more than 10 days or 25% of any quarter; second,
there were the students who did not speak English as their native tongue and
were not yet proficient with the language, the English Language Learners; and
third, there were the special education students some of who were mainstreamed
and others who were enrolled in one of our two cluster units or in our resource
program. How to we help these small groups
without losing the growth of 98% of our student-body?
How do we improve the attendance of
our not often here students? In the old
days, schools could just send a truant officer to the absent student’s home and
retrieve him, but with some many students home-schooled, truant officers are a
thing of the past. The administrators
could prosecute the parents of most blatant non-attenders, but they did not
seem happy to do that. (It seems there is a lot of paperwork connected with any
court case.) Somehow we need to
communicate to these parents that their children need to be in school every day
if they expect to do well. We need to
communicate to those students that their education should be important to them,
so they should insist on going to school every day. Some schools have used rewards system. One principal identifies those students and
has them come to his office every morning and tell him good morning. Sometimes there are a surprise candy bar and
other times just a warm greeting. Another principal identifies these students,
meets with them regularly and if they improved their attendance, he takes them
to lunch every two weeks: Lunch with the principal, what middle school student could
pass on a deal like that? This might work in a school where less than one
percent fall into that category, but in most inner-city school the problem of
attendance is more difficult to solve.
What about the students just
learning English? In my school all of
these students are mainstreamed into the regular classes and only a few of them
receive extra help from a study skills teacher.
Granted, all of these students could be counted on one and half hands,
but still they are a subgroup. For
example, I had one student who was a refuge from a tribal group in Africa. The counseling staff did not know from which
country he was from or which language he spoke, only that he did not speak or
write English. I am not trained as an ESL teacher. I contacted the district office to ask if
they had some materials I could use to help him. They couldn’t help me because his foster
parents had not indicated on their paperwork that he required language
services. I used my own money to buy
material and at the suggestion of another teacher purchased some applications
for my I-Pad to help him build a small vocabulary. When the rest of the class read Treasure
Island, he worked on my I-Pad at his desk. Social Services moved him to a new foster
home before we took the C.R.T. test. He
could write his name and he knew his alphabet and probably 100 words in
English, but he was not ready to take his exam.
Teachers need the support of the school, the district, and the
administrators if they have any hope of improving the education of students who
are learning English. Teachers need
training, materials and class time to work one-on-one with these students.
What about the students in special
education? In our school we have two
clusters: High Functioning Autism and Life Skills Cluster and three resource teachers. Students in the Life Skills Cluster remain
with their teacher for most of their academic classes, but may take one or two
electives. The students in High
Functioning Autism are sometimes mainstreamed. Many students who qualify for resource are
mainstreamed and some only take one class with a resource teacher and are
mainstreamed for the rest of the day.
The resource teachers and High Functioning Autism teacher offer support
and advice to the rest of the faculty.
For most of these students concentrating long enough to complete a C.R.T.
exam is difficult. For many of them
acquiring the skills to pass a state exam is problematic.
The truth is all three of these
groups do not do well on state exams for obvious reasons. Now, there is the
Common Core Curriculum with a more rigorous S.A.G.E. test. Students who did well on the C.R.T. tests are
expected to do poorly on the new test. At my school, we are preparing for the more
rigorous test with a new program where for twenty-five minute twice a week
students who had not mastered a specific learning goal in a class are retaught
that particular skill again. This means that fifty minutes a week 98% of the
student-body do enhancement or meaningless activities while the two percent
relearned a specific learning goal. That
means 500 minutes of instruction time is lost each quarter to 98% of the
students. Another words, teachers have a more rigorous curriculum to teach, but
will be losing thirty-three hours and twenty minutes of instruction time per
year to re-teach the skills for two percent of the population, half of whom are
absent. Nonetheless, if the school spends all of its resources to help this two
percent, they may be forsaking the 98%. Wasting
500 minutes of valuable instructional time per quarter is counter-productive. Boring
students with meaningless activities diminishes their desire to learn more and
usually results in them entertaining themselves in inappropriate ways.
The reason “No Child Left Behind”
worked well in theory but not in the real world, is there are students we can
improve, but not all of them may become proficient in a single year. English Language Learners way take up to ten
years to become proficient in a foreign language; special education students
learn at different rate than students without learning disabilities. We do need to improve the attendance of the
non-attender; we do need to find more effective ways to meet the needs of the
English Language Learners and the special education students; however, the
truth is we may not be effective with every student. A better approach to
solving the problems left in the learning gap is to look at the data from the
new S.A.G.E. test when it becomes available (September or October), and improve
instruction on the skills that students had difficulty with. Ask the right
questions: why did they performing poorly and why is this student missing so
much school? Perhaps it is a problem
that is easy to fix. Don’t forget to mind the gap.