As I drove home today, I was turning over a puzzle that I can't solve: how to help some of my lowest-performing students reach the levels demanded of them by standardized testing mandated by state and federal law. These students work, for the most part, very diligently, but due to circumstances beyond their control, they may never make it to what the state and the fed in their almighty wisdom have said is necessary to get that most basic of tools needed to have any sort of success in life, a high school diploma.
I'm tired and I'm confused. What chance have these kids got? I stood beside one as she took her test today, and she was working so hard, so very, very hard, giving me everything she had. I don't know that it's going to be enough. What am I going to do? How am I going to bridge that gap? I can adapt, accommodate, adjust, and basically rewrite everything I do; I can bend myself into a teacher pretzel, but I don't have magic. I'm so afraid that I'm not going to be anything like enough when it all is said and done. I'm afraid that I'm going to fail them.
It's a terrible feeling. My day is split between student who will go on to be the proverbial doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs, who will blaze brilliant swaths through their chosen fields and trades, and then these little lost ones who are slowly slipping through the cracks of society. Why can't there be a place for all of them to be okay?
There in lies the problem with public schools. They try to shove every student into the same box. Zero tolerance is bad in any application, and that's what No Child is. There's no room for creativity wen dealing with students.
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