Adequate Yearly Progress

by Roxanna Elden

She was one of those heavily accessorized, well-connected former teachers who had long ago retreated to offices within the district headquarters, emerging at the beginning of each school year to give PowerPoint presentations.

TransformationalChangers, as Dr. Barrios thought of them, always seemed to have taught for exactly two years. Then they moved on to work at places whose names were capitalized words stuck together. They seemed both impossibly young and impossibly self-assured,

It was never a promising sign when a new student entered on a Wednesday in mid-October.

Nothing dissuaded teenagers like a mandatory heart-to-heart conversation with a concerned adult.

Above the day’s Curriculum Standard of the Day, in comically large letters, he’d added: RESEARCH-BASED BEST PRACTICE THAT WORKS™ ALL STUDENTS ON TASK, ALL THE TIME™

And then there was seventh period, the class that filled Kaytee with increasing dread as the end of each day approached. The students in seventh period weren’t as loud as the ones in first period, but they were so negative, so mean.

We all have one of these classes...

When she controlled the details, everything worked just as it was supposed to. It was when the kids entered the room that chaos took over. They were so messy and unruly. They talked loudly and talked back and didn’t follow directions and didn’t care. All except a few.

Yet there was always one paper that made her finally decide to pack up for the day, her comment-making capacity depleted. This paper felt like it might be the insurmountable one.

Oh god, when I see a whole project that has been put through Google translate. 🙄😭 Time to quit grading.

And she wasn’t just supposed to correct the spelling errors, either. She was supposed to write something meaningful on this paper, something that could conceivably begin to bridge the chasm between its author and a person who might, one day, actually own a veterinary clinic. Then she was supposed to do the same thing for the next paper, and the next, and the one after that, despite her waning concentration.

“Our strategy is to have teachers use what students don’t know as a starting point, and then perform actions that will make students know those things.” “Isn’t that”—Lena was confused—“pretty much the definition of teaching?”

Students who learned coolness as a second language never quite lost their accents.

“CSOTD AND…?” Dr. Barrios reached into his memory, grasping for clues to what the letters might stand for. He sometimes suspected Mr. Scamphers, who was nearly bouncing in his chair on the other side of the big desk, made up these confusing acronyms as he went along. “RBBPTWOTD. Research-Based Best Practice That Works of the Day. I’m creating forms for teachers to chart each student’s progress on the CSOTDs and track which RBBPTWOTDs they’re using.” Okay. So CSOTD stood for Curriculum Standard of the Day. And Mr. Scamphers was creating additional paperwork. All was as expected.

Reminds me of when I first started at my current district! 😂😂 SRI, SCIP, GLS, SSR, and I can’t even remember what else.

Everyone knew the real reason discipline numbers looked good: Mrs. Rawlins was the assistant principal in charge of discipline, and she rarely enforced any actual consequences. This not only kept suspension numbers low, it also meant few teachers bothered to fill out referral forms in the first place—and these were the two ways the district calculated discipline numbers. It was, of course, these same two tendencies that caused actual student behavior at the school to skid downhill, but this was no time to make changes to the one set of numbers that felt assured.

On the last night of a break, teachers often reported similar dreams. Common themes included showing up to school in pajamas or bathrobes, waking up late, or completely forgetting how to get to the school, taking a string of wrong turns in unfamiliar terrain. Another shared nightmare involved schedule changes. In these, teachers learned they’d be teaching classes of several hundred students in enormous, irregularly shaped rooms, or on open fields where even the loudest of voices would be lost in the wind. In time, they would all settle back into their familiar routines. Their shared dread would recede as they realized they had not, in fact, forgotten how to teach over vacation. Still, on that last night they would all sleep fitfully, checking their clocks in panic and twisting their sheets into ropes. Most would wake the next morning in similar states of crankiness, powering through the day on coffee and adrenaline.

Even when it’s just a long weekend, like Thanksgiving break, I have nightmares and can’t sleep the night before returning to school.

There had always been people who turned out to be bad at teaching, but most of them had the decency to quit. They filed out as part of the larger exodus of teachers who’d just had it with some aspect of the job.

She had entered teaching expecting students who, with the right question or book recommendation, would demonstrate some untapped well of deep, original thinking. Instead, she’d found that teenagers who had never read a full book were unlikely to share original thoughts. They were much more likely to parrot clichés from social-media celebrities or believe made-up news, or say things like It doesn’t really matter whether you vote—or require bribes to come to tutoring sessions, where they stuttered through passages about Helen Keller.

Must every story be a life-affirming testament to the strength of the human spirit? Was it even responsible to insist that every ugly duckling would become a swan, that every little engine could make it over the hill, that all the puzzle pieces needed for a happy ending were already in the box and one only needed the grit to fit them together?

There were three more class periods before lunchtime—three groups of students filing in and out at the sound of the bell. Lena told them all to work in their workbooks. She sat in her desk chair, trying to seem busy. Choosing words and saying them aloud seemed like a responsibility for which she was no longer suited. Why had she ever wanted to become a teacher? Why had she chosen a job that wedged her so tightly into the chain of cause and effect that when she made a wrong move, the dominos never stopped falling? She wanted to lie down forever, cover her face in a room full of silence.

Some days are like this. We argue with a student, we have a tough class, and we feel like a failure at what we have devoted our lives to. So we wallow for a day and then try to make tomorrow better.

What, in any case, was an adequate amount of progress to make in a year? If he’d learned anything, it was that there was no happily ever after in education, no riding off into the sunset. There was only one yearly fix after another. Then, in August, the whole cycle started again. It was exhausting.