still batting .1000

I've never been wrong about a special ed referral - every child I've ever wondered, "Is there a processing issue at work here?" - there was. Usually a huge, masked one.

I have two children to work with for tutoring, and the boy is so low that within about one minute I was wanting to look in his cumulative file and see what's up. Of course, there is no cumulative file, but where he evacuated to tested him and the mother is "trying to get the records." Um, ok, they left there more than six months ago - why didn't she request them when she left? Sigh.

There's no special ed program in the school; there's a resource teacher who oversees the IEPs, but that's it. The boy doesn't know his phone number, because I met the resource teacher when she came to ask him in order to contact his mother.

Hearing him read is really painful for me. Really, really painful. The director said he tested at a 5th grade level and I said, yeah, I don't think so, but I gave him the book she provided (I don't know where she got that score). He had almost a week to practice, and I could tell he did - but it was like someone with advanced cerebral palsy trying to run. And he was so concerned with trying to say all the words that he had no idea what any of them meant.

The director wanted to take him away from me and have me work with somebody who's closer to proficient to get the test scores of the school up. (That's the game schools play now - ignoring the lowest and highest kids because they don't affect the test scores - it's the kids who are basic getting up to proficient - that's the most bang for the test score buck.) Because honestly, even with the best intervention that money could buy (which this school sure don't have), he won't get proficient in the next three months.

But I will work my magic. I flirted a little with the counselor (who "stops in" occasionally - he's from a university and it's not his actual job, but he does it at a number of schools) to get info on the testing that the boy will need to pass to move to high school, and I did the same with his science teacher (OK, that all the men in the school are very hot Black men has nothing to do with me showing up!), and I bonded with his English and social studies teachers, and I'll do the same with the resource teacher. Once they trust me, we can work together.

For their high school exit exam, and the lower level exams, they have the four core subjects rather than just Language Arts and Math like in California. But, I've spent time in both the science and social studies classrooms, and there's not much learning happening there - it's too much textbook copying and no relating. I feel for the social studies teacher - she's having a series of bad days, and I had a year like that. And it's for very similar reasons: our classes were taken away from us mid-year. Teachers shouldn't be treated like that because the children suffer.

There's this idea here in NOLA that teachers have been holding the school system hostage - that tenure makes it impossible for quality education to happen. It's insane, but it's a firmly entrenched notion. To deal with it, administrators at schools are taking random acts to prove they're in charge and teachers don't have a voice - like switching classrooms and students regularly, changing content without notice, that sort of thing. The sort of thing that ruins teaching flow and hurts kids. Teachers like me, we need to have vision to plan quality lessons -a vision you can't have if you don't know what you'll be teaching. We need physical space to orient around - for organizing student workspace and showing their work and making an environment that works for our teaching method strengths and students' needs. If you keep changing who our students are, we don't get to know them - so then how can we meet their needs? They aren't widgets.

I wish I could be at his IEP meeting today, but I have class. It's so easy for me to slip back into teacher mode/advocate mode. I don't know Louisiana or New Orleans educational system, but I know systems and i know federal special ed law and I know what 8th grade boys with learning disabilities need.

And, one of the things he needs is me, a tutor for 2-3 hours a week to work with him on his reading and boost his performance in other classes.

So, I said to the director, no thanks - I'm keeping who I got. Because maybe working with him won't help the school's test scores much, but it might just help him.