A New SIGIS Series is Coming

My last post in this space was in July and was the most recent in a series of posts about the coronavirus and returning to the classroom during a pandemic. I've had a busy fall and school for me, for everyone, has been very different, but still the same too. 

Since the spring we have all learned a lot more about the virus. Politicization of the virus has created huge divisions in thinking and approach, but in the classroom none of that comes into play. In my classroom, we are socially distanced as much as possible, for example. This was a lot easier when we did the hybrid A/B schedule, but that was not working for the students, so when we returned to normal schedule, I've returned to pretty much normal numbers in the desks. This means nobody is really spread out anymore. So, we clean and sanitize a whole lot. 

The latest data suggests getting the virus from surfaces is a long shot, but we clean anyway. I'm not taking chances. Between every single class I spray and wipe the desks and let them dry the required ten minutes, although between blocks three and four the dry time doesn't happen. When we use Chromebooks, those get wiped down too. High touch surfaces are wiped constantly and we don't share supplies. 

We wear masks. The students, for the most part, are pretty good about it, but I see them getting lax as time goes on. I have a few that I've battled from day one to keep the mask on, or pulled up. But, I'd say 95% of my students are in compliance and that's not a bad number. 

The massive outbreaks of Covid have not happened. There have been cases, sure, but in a pandemic we expect this. Nobody has become critically ill that I know about, however we only really hear about exposures through the grapevine. That, and when someone comes into your room with a yardstick and pulls kids out for the fourteen day quarantine. This has not happened in my room, but it's happened. 

So, it's really not been as bad as we thought initially. And with this knowledge, it's easier to see that the benefit of being in school is so much better than keeping the kids at home.  The kids need the normalcy of school and they need the structure, the social aspect, the food, the security net. 

I don't really regret going back, as nervous as I was.

With numbers rising again, we just need to stay vigilant. I can't spread kids out in my classroom, and my windows don't open, so ventilation is poor. I bought an air purifier which I have on all the time, and maybe that does some good. I don't know. As we return to school after Thanksgiving break, we will have to reaffirm our diligence to cleaning, mask-wearing, distancing, as much as possible. More outbreaks are inevitable. 

I have six more months before I retire from the classroom after twenty-five years. With that in mind, I'm beginning a new series in this space inspired by a teacher friend of mine who is also retiring this year. She and I have been childhood friends, taught together for five years in Caddo Parish, and we are both retiring this year although she has more years in than I do. She's been doing a series on her Facebook page, "Tales of a Teacher" and it's been a lot of fun to read. I hope she compiles them in a book when she retires! Duly inspired, I'm going to record my reflections in this space. 

I've been compiling these in my head for about twenty years. I won't ever publish them in a book; when I retire, I will be writing more books but one about teaching won't be one of them. Any reflecting I do will be right here. 

Lots of teachers write memoirs, I think. I don't usually read them...I mean, I live it every day. In my opinion, the best, most honest teacher "memoir" has already been written. Bel Kauffman's Up the Down Staircase is blisteringly funny and oh so true! No one should go into teaching without reading it. It may be a little dated, but it's still all so true. If that's what I could name this series without getting sued, I would.

I taught French in Caddo for five years...I wasn't certified to teach French, but if I'd been asked to teach calculus I'd have figured it out and done it. I needed a job. I moved to Bossier High School in 2001; my career in Bossier Parish began with 9/11 and it's ending in a pandemic. But it's been my home for twenty years and I never gave one second thought to leaving my school. You'll see why.

Teaching has been an incredibly rewarding career; I've met the most memorable kids, a few forgettable ones, some fabulous administrators, and made some of the best friends I will ever have. I've been inspired every single day. Sometimes I've been red hot angry and wanted to blow everything up with my words; other times, moved to tears by the love I have for my job, my friends, my school, my classroom, my students, and the difference we as teachers and administrators make every single day. 

You'll hear about all of it, the good, the bad, the love and inspiration.

My picture for this post is the pathway I walk every morning when I get to school at 6:35 a.m.. Come on inside with me.

John Bel Edwards Ready to Buy Teacher Votes for 2019

After listening to Governor John Bel Edwards rant and rail about Louisiana's fiscal cliff all spring, and after listening to Louisiana politicians wrangle over a single penny for months, now things have changed.  Now we are looking at an election year and Edwards wants to buy teacher votes to ensure his re-election in 2019.

The budget crisis gripped the state all spring and into the summer: old people in nursing homes got letters of eviction; every program imaginable was threatened with loss of funding from TOPS scholarships to food stamps.  Eventually, after scaring everyone in the state to death, legislators agreed on a 4.45% sales tax rate to save the day, plus some other shell game moves.

The crisis averted, the governor now looks toward re-election in 2019 and where else to start loading his votes but on the backs of teachers. This plan worked so well for him in his initial run as his wife, a former music teacher, appeared on television asking all of her brethren to vote for her husband because he knows what teachers go through.  He believes in teachers, she said.

That may be so, but we still have John White as our State Superintendent of Education and because of that we still have canned, scripted lessons in our classrooms and for that I hold John Bel Edwards responsible.

Granted, Edwards did not hire White; that distinction belongs to Bobby Jindal.  And Edwards has at times seemed interested in questioning White's job security:

In a renewal of tensions, Gov. John Bel Edwards said Wednesday his office is reviewing state Superintendent of Education John White's job status.  

Edwards, in his statewide radio show, said White should have faced state Senate confirmation during the 2017 regular legislative session, which did not happen. "He needed to be confirmed to continue to serve," the governor said. "We are looking at that situation."  

Edwards, an attorney, said the issue may need to be litigated but that he was not prepared to make an announcement.

That was over a year ago.

Efforts through the courts to remove White have failed due to lack of standing; the efforts have not come from Edwards who, according to the court, is one of only four people who could challenge White's contract.

As a teacher, it's probably not in my best interest to criticize John White, but as a human being I do think that the current curriculum that White has implemented across the state is a failure, a mess, and is dangerous to the future of our students.

I know students who used to love reading and love English who now hate it.  This is true.

I will never, ever be a fan of a canned, scripted curriculum that strips autonomy from teachers, that removes the teachable moment from the classroom, that requires teachers to read from scripts, annotate thick binders of scripted teacher notes, produce said annotations on demand, display canned PowerPoint slides, or that requires students to read the same non-fiction speeches and texts over and over and over and fill out the same graphic organizers over and over and  over for each one.

I could go on, but I'll stop with that.

And for this, I hold John Bel Edwards responsible.

It is almost without exception that each election cycle the politicians use educators and first responders as pawns to get themselves back into office.  The only time anyone ever seems to care about paying teachers or police officers an adequate salary is during an election year.  Otherwise they threaten old people with loss of health insurance coverage and terrify college kids with loss of scholarships unless they get more tax dollars with which they can continue spending lavishly on pet programs.

It's no wonder I've lost my taste for political blogging.

I don't know who is running against Edwards yet, but I'll be looking their way and listening to what they have to say about curriculum in our public schools.

They can keep their bribe money; I just want my classroom back.


Further Reading:
Louisiana's Future First Lady Donna Edwards has her Husband's Ear on Education Issues (NOLA, January 5, 2016)
Louisiana House Approves Compromise Sales Tax (NOLA, June 22, 2018)
With Cuts Near, Edwards Says Time for Solutions is Now (U.S. News, June 18, 2018)
What is a Scripted Curriculum and How Flexible is it? (SIGIS, May 30, 2018)
The Effects of Student-Teacher Relationships: Social and Academic Outcomes of Low-Income Middle and High School Students (Opus; NYU, 2013)
Meet John White (La DOE)
Teacher Slams Scripted Common Core Lessons that Must be Taught Word for Word (Washington Post, November 30, 2013)

The Classroom Reading Project: End of Week Two

Every single student is reading!

I sat at my desk after all the students left on this Friday afternoon and wanted to weep.  I was overwhelmed.  But it's probably not what you think.

I started Donalynn Miller's Forty Book Challenge this year after reading (devouring) her book, The Book Whisperer, this past summer.  Here at the end of Week Two, I am simply astounded.  I did not think that after twenty-three years in the classroom that my students could or would surprise me, but boy was I wrong.

I wrote about Week One here - you should read that before you go any further if you haven't already.

Briefly, I have dedicated at least twenty minutes, and perhaps more, of class time every single day for my students to read books of their choice.  I spent the summer collecting books through donations (thank you!!!!) and through my own thrift store excursions.  We now have almost three hundred unique titles and duplicates of about twenty-five more.

As our new school year started, discussions of books was part of the very first day and by the end of week one (which was only three days), I had ten books checked out already from our classroom library.

The next Monday, the first full week, we started reading.  We started at fifteen minutes every single day no matter what.  I don't want to signal that anything else is more important than reading.

I have one Creative Writing class, one regular English II class, and one Pre-AP English II class.  Last week I reported that perhaps five were not really on board with this reading thing.  In the meantime I picked up one new student who was not with us from day one and that changes the dynamic just a little.  He was not there for the Readers Interest Survey or the initial book frenzy that happened the first week.  He's a little reluctant.  Very polite, but for the past four days has had a book on his desk with the cover closed, sitting quietly until we are through reading.

This won't do.

So Wednesday I conferred with him before class and explained, this is what we do here in this class; we are readers.  We read.  "I promise, we can find a book here that you will enjoy reading."  He looked at me skeptically, nodded his head, and kept the same dystopian novel on his desk, unopened.

Thursday I stopped him as he entered the class and asked him if instead of reading today, would he mind filling out this Reader's Interest Survey and this Student Interest Survey that everyone else filled out on the first day?  He happily agreed.  So at this point, he was not just doing his own thing,  he was doing what I asked of him.

From his survey I learned that he does like sports and he is in fact not a fan of reading.  He has few books in his home.  He has not read a book since middle school.  But, somewhere in that process he became more open to what everyone else in the room was doing and today, Friday, he read a chapter in his book.  Not only that, he wrote about it in his Reader's Notebook which we turn in every Friday.  He's with us!

When I took up Reader's Notebooks last week, the response letters the students wrote to me were perfectly adequate and covered their bases, but nothing stood out much.  As I said last week, the responses were not superficial - I could tell they were reading, but it was obvious that the relationships weren't all in place yet.

This week?

Oh my goodness.

I stayed late (again) to read and respond to every single one.  The responses made me want to weep!

These kids are really reading.  Several have finished books already and are on their second or third books.  Some are relishing the books they have and said they don't want them to end.  Many of them asked for recommendations about what to read next:

"Mrs. Becker, I'm reading this book, and it's good and all, but I really don't know what I want to read next.  Suggestions appreciated.  And welcome!"

The beginning of a trusting relationship.  BOOM!  (I suggested five different titles for her.)

In these early weeks, I am reading with them: in her book, Donalynn Miller makes the point that kids need reading role models and she says she read along with her students for the first few weeks before she then began to move among them having little conferences with each one about what they were reading, making suggestions, and sharing thoughts.  I am currently reading What the Dog Knows: Scent, Science and the Amazing Ways Dogs Perceive the World by Cat Warren.  (I love the irony of a book about dogs written by a woman named Cat.)

I'm going to make an analogy here - it might be a stretch, but stay with me on this.  In this Dog book, Cat Warren is discussing training dogs; she has a German Shepherd she has trained to be a cadaver dog.  In discussing this training, she compares the energy level and curiosity of working dogs to the "notion of human expertise":

"We watch playful children start out banging incoherently on the piano.  That's a start but it's the structured, guided practice and play with constant feedback over an extended period of time that can turn random notes on a keyboard first into 'Doe, a deer, a female deer' and ultimately into Thelonious Monk's 'Round Midnight'.  That is, if a parental figure doesn't ruin the sound of music by haranguing the child to practice.  Along the way, a number of the motor behaviors for playing the piano become automatic, so the child doesn't have to think about them. The fingers start to fly by themselves up and down the ivories as body memory pulls them along."

Why would reading be any different?  I don't believe that it is.

Warren goes on to explain that in training dogs, it takes time to develop the necessary skills and that they "need a chance to learn before their capabilities are dismissed."  It takes time.

And this is why we do not, and will not, skip our designated reading time every single day.  It's that important.  Students need to see that it is priority.  Their learning, their time, is priority.

Warren later explains about training her dog, Solo, to specific scents.  She describes hiding the cadaver scent in a series of buckets and to the dog it all seems like play, but of course it is through conditioning that the dog is rewarded when he finds the right bucket with the right scent.  Praised and rewarded, "he is hooked."

One of the trainers Warren worked with explained it to her:

"When people get interested, they can get hooked hard-core.  They don't like not being successful." 

He was talking about gamblers and comparing that drive to training dogs, but the analogy seems clear.

Students don't like not being successful either, and I believe that when they have choice about what they read the odds of success go up exponentially.

So, we read.  And we will read, every single day.

Watching this all unfold in my classroom over these past thirteen days has been the most remarkable thing.  I know it's early.  This could all still go crazy wrong.  I sure hope not.

This afternoon when I stayed until four o'clock on a Friday to read and respond to these weekly letters in their notebooks, as I said before, I wanted to cry.  Remember my boy I wrote about last week who told me he did not like to read, did not want to read, and he just looked miserable?  Last week I put Chasing Space on his desk with a sticky note that said, "Try this one!"

This week, this is what he wrote:

He is enjoying the book!  He's making connections to his own experience.  He's learning new vocabulary, background knowledge, syntax, and comprehension skills.

And you know what else?  The relationship is there.  Trust.  We have had several conversations this week about books, about what he is reading, and about school.  It's the most rewarding thing in the world.

It's why I teach.


And y'all - I think I'm going to need more books!  Here's the wish list if you want to send us something!  ;)

I am so excited about what this year will bring and about how much my students are going to grow! 

The Classroom Reading Project: End of Week One

Because so many of you have donated, and are still donating, books to our new classroom library, and because I promised to let you know how this “reading in class” project was going, I’d like to take just a moment here at the end of the first full week and do just that.

The first day of school was typical meet and greet fare, explain the course material, class rules and expectations, and that sort of thing. I did talk about our classroom library and show students which shelves were fiction and which held non-fiction. We talked about their reading habits and I had them fill out reading interest surveys so I could gather information I could use to help suggest books for them.

By Day Two we were reading. Actually, at least ten students checked books out the first day.

I have started out with fifteen minutes at the beginning of each class. I hope to work up to thirty minutes a day. That sounds like a lot of class time, and it is, but I believe, and piles of research supports, that silent reading helps students not just with vocabulary acquisition but also with processing ideas. The more they read the better they will get at comprehension. Additionally, reading develops that critical background knowledge that so many lack.

I am still following my prescribed curriculum and covering the mandated standards that are tested at the end of each semester.

Overall, even at this early stage, I’m very pleased with how many are buying into this project and with the feedback they are giving me. I have about fifty-five students through the day and of those only perhaps five have not bought in to reading a book. I have three boys in particular who are resisting.

“I don’t like reading,” one says.

I believe that he just hasn’t found the right book! I keep putting books on his desk, suggestions based on information he has given me about what he likes and doesn’t like. So far nothing is sticking. Right now he is reading a book far below his ability “because it has pictures.”

I have another boy who isn’t as verbal about his dislike of reading but just grabs a random book off the shelf each day and opens it to any page, staring at it. I talk to him daily, trying to get him committed to a book. I know from our discussions that he likes science so I put a book on his desk

Friday about space. He read a couple of pages and kept the book; this is progress!

All five of my resistant readers are in the same class; I’m not certain how they will change the scope of this activity, or if I will alter anything because of them. Right now I am taking it day by day. I’m under the perhaps naive hope that they will see the rest of us talking about books and sharing good books and they will eventually fall in line. As I said, perhaps I’m being naive in this hope, but I’m going to stick with it.

I’m committed to this project and I don’t alter our reading schedule for any reason. We had to take a parish required Diagnostic test this week, but we read our books first. It is already becoming routine to them to begin their reading immediately after turning in their first five and in two of my three classes I no longer have to announce that it’s reading time or direct them to take out books. Even better, in all three classes I’m seeing students take their books back out and start reading when they finish their assignments.

Over the next couple of weeks I will reinforce the idea of finding reading time through the day and we will have discussions about all of those extra minutes in the day that you could read: waiting at the bus stop, waiting in line for school pictures, at lunch, before bed, on the bus on the way to and from school…, the possibilities are limitless.

I’ve given each student a Reader’s Notebook which I patterned after Donalyn Miller’s description in The Book Whisperer. In it, students have designated pages for their Reading Log and books they want to read. Most of the notebook is for correspondence with me about their reading: each Friday they write me a letter about their book and what is happening in it. They are expected to reflect on what they’ve read, get into a little character analysis or plot discussion, and then I write each student back a few lines.

They turned in their first letters yesterday, and every single student turned in a notebook. I stayed late after school yesterday so I could read each one and respond. None of them were so superficial that I felt like they were just making it up. Even my five who haven’t bought-in completely yet were honest about that and explained what they had attempted to read and why it didn’t work.

So, here at this very early date, I’m really excited about what is happening in my classroom and I know that something good has to come of this for my students. I know they are engaged, they are reading, and they are learning. We are sharing ideas and having discussions and building a really unique classroom environment where we are all readers.

I hope we can keep it going!

If you want to help us out and send us a book off our wish list, here is the Amazon link!

Further reading:
It's Not Complicated! by Donalyn Miller (April 22, 2018)

Louisiana Schools to Pilot New Testing Program

I have a friend that refers to the endless cycle of education initiatives as "Stalin's five-year plan."

We've all seen them - from Kagan to Harry Wong to Whole Brain, one after the other meant to revolutionize and improve education and student performance.  Districts invest time and money in the programs, spend countless dollars on inservice, training, and materials, then the plan is abandoned for the next shiny thing that comes.  Repeat cycle.

That's why when I ranted and railed about the newest curriculum implementation, the Louisiana version of Common Core, my friend smiled sweetly and said, "Just remember.  Stalin's five-year plan."

And thus things keep changing.

At least nothing stays stagnant this way, right?

Last month, the Louisiana Department of Education's proposal for a new kind of testing was approved by the U.S. Department of Education:

This new pilot measuring students' knowledge of specific books, rather than texts they have not read before, the test aspires to build knowledge of facts and texts in students. "Research shows students need deep knowledge of a subject in order to effectively read about it," said State Superintendent John White.

This just seems like common sense, right?

Louisiana has five years to develop and pilot this assessment and it will be rolled out in five districts: Ouachita Parish, St. John the Baptist Parish, and St. Tammany Parish, as well as KIPP Public Charter Schools and Collegiate Academies in Orleans Parish.

Key points of this new program will include:

Combining English and social studies tests to streamline state testing;  

Measuring what students have learned via passages from books that students have read, rather than passages that they have not read as part of the curriculum;  

Assessing students through several brief assessments throughout the year, rather than one longer test at the end of the year;  

Preserving local control as to which books and which assessments their students will take.

I am cautiously interested.

The district in which I teach is on block schedule. Last year, first semester, which ran from August to December, we had minimum fourteen days of standardized testing.  Second semester, we backed off of that to about ten days.  This year, it looks like about seven days.  That's an estimate.  Are we starting to see the error of our testing ways?

The tests students currently take are supposedly aligned to the the standards students cover in the classroom, not necessarily the content.  Theoretically, if you can identify and analyze a main idea in one text, you can do it in any other.

My complaint with the current curriculum has been, in part,  that it strips fiction to bare bones and focuses heavily on some very dry non-fiction.  We don't read whole novels at all, ever.  The problem with that is not in the non-fiction necessarily, but think of what's lost with the loss of fiction!  We need both fiction and non-fiction because both serve to build background knowledge.

In my own reading this summer I went to the land of Inkheart and learned a little bit about book restoration and how valuable books are; I visited fantastic realms and looked at things from other perspectives. I read The 57 Bus and gained knowledge I did not previously have about people who identify as agender and about hate crimes. The lessons of tolerance and acceptance were reinforced. I read Boy21 and saw how friends can help each other through trying times.  I read The Other Wes Moore and learned a lot about how environment shapes character and how the most impulsive decisions can change lives.  I read The Book Whisperer and Teach Like a Pirate to expand my professional development and learned valuable lessons from both.  We gain background knowledge from both fiction and non-fiction.

Do you think the majority of my students spent the summer reading and expanding their own background knowledge?

This new system of assessment recognizes the knowledge gap that many students have.  This is something that the Six Way Paragraphs program also recognizes, which I have used in my lower level classes to build background knowledge and raise reading comprehension skills.

From the Louisiana Department of Education's proposal:

Being a literate member of society necessitates not only strong reading skills but also knowledge of the world and how it works. Adults comprehend and evaluate news articles, workplace documents, novels, web pages, and social media posts not just because they know what individual words mean, but because they know something about the topic each text contains. Likewise, it is widely known that students with large amounts of background knowledge read at more advanced levels. Yet states have built reading and writing tests that do not always value the background knowledge students bring to them, including students’ deep understanding of books and texts they have studied previously. Instead, state tests preference reading and writing skills over the content that renders them rich and meaningful.

Read that last line again:  "...states preference reading and writing skills over the content that renders them rich and meaningful."

We've been teaching skills over content and content is not meaningful unless it is relevant and makes a connection.

Nobody knows this better than the teacher in the room with the student, and my student may not engage with the same subject matter as your student.  I need the power to make that decision.

More from the Louisiana proposal: (emphasis mine)

Though improved dramatically in the past three years, the Louisiana Assessment of Education Progress (LEAP) continues to measure the ELA standards, including specific skills such as summarizing passages and locating main ideas, but it does not go above that to measure whether students have developed a base of knowledge. Consequently, in many schools a focus on discrete reading skills predominates the English classroom, with minimal attention paid to knowledge.

Again, we are measuring standards, not knowledge.  They are not the same thing.  One produces test competence, the other functioning, well-rounded human beings.

Under this new pilot program, Louisiana proposes to still focus on standards but also content:  "drawing on students’ deep knowledge of content and books from their daily classroom experiences—rather than a random assortment of texts, as are typically used on large-scale assessments."

Currently, when students get to the LEAP at the end of the year, what they read on that test is nothing like what they read in class and only serves to make those tests frustrating to students and raises anxiety to terrible levels.  Additionally, this format shakes confidence in what these high-stakes tests actually measure.

It's even possible, under this as yet undeveloped program, that the test students take in one school or one district may vary from one another:

By developing the new format in a way that is standards-aligned, valid, reliable, high-quality, and comparable to the current, content agnostic LEAP ELA test, Louisiana districts will have the flexibility to choose the LEAP format that best matches their curricular program. In this way, the IADA will make assessments more relevant and connected to the classroom for Louisiana teachers and students, while still providing valid, reliable, and transparent data on student achievement and growth.

I've got to say it: I love this term: "content agnostic LEAP ELA test."  I need that on a sign.

Students would be tested during the year on what they've covered in class and then a shorter, less horrific, summative assessment at the end of the year.

Clearly this new assessment program hasn't been written yet and so there is still much that remains to be seen.  I am all for getting rid of all these interim tests and three days of EOC testing.

Most of all, I hope that some flexibility is returned to the classroom and some sort of recognition that the teacher is a trained professional who does not need a script or canned slides.  I hope that the state returns some autonomy to the teacher who can best judge what the students before him need to read and how to engage them.

Students will read when they have choice, and when they are engaged with a subject, and a student that reads is a student that develops knowledge.  A student forced to read Carrie Chapman Catt's suffrage speech will more than likely tune out and learn nothing, (no disrespect intended to Carrie Chapman Catt).

Relevance matters.

I am cautiously optimistic that perhaps the Louisiana DOE is beginning to see the faults in the Guidebooks and to hear the cries of frustrated teachers across the state.

But again, maybe it's just part of Stalin's five-year plan.

Further Reading:
A New Vision for Assessment in Louisiana (Louisiana DOE)
Louisiana's New Pilot Offers New Way to Assess Student Achievement (BR Proud)
Louisiana First to Have Innovative Assessments Approved (Education Dive)
Betsy DeVoss Oks Louisiana Pitch to Use Innovative Tests (Education Week)
Louisiana LEAP Scores Show Reasonable Improvement but not Extraordinary Growth (NOLA)

The Book Whisperer: a Review

The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller

We have just returned from our annual vacation to the Midwest and after a day or two catching up on laundry and restocking the pantry, I'm beginning to get back into my routine.

We had a wonderful time: Iowa is a beautiful place everyone is so friendly.  We caught two baseball games (one in Frisco, TX and one in Des Moines), we visited the Iowa state capital (it is magnificent), we traveled Route 66 from Oklahoma City to Joplin, Missouri (I love it), we toured Fort Smith, Arkansas, and we spent a lot of time with family.

It was a good trip and now that I'm home I realize that I report back to school in about three weeks.

Where has my summer gone?!

I've spent the entire summer working to get books for my new classroom library, for one thing.  People have been so generous in sending and donating books.  Donations have contributed nearly 100 books for my classroom from my Amazon Wish List.  I have purchased probably two dozen from my own list, and I've rounded up several large stacks from thrift stores.  My library now has about 140 books, which is far short of my 500 books by August 6 goal, but certainly large enough to get us started.

I have just finished reading Donalyn Miller's highly recommended The Book Whisperer (2009); Miller is an advocate of free reading.  In her sixth grade classroom she has a library of 2,000 books (her room must be bigger than mine!), and from Day 1 she has her students reading from the library.  Their requirement is forty books in the school year and she establishes a certain number of books from all genres.  Miller says that all of her lessons come back to what her students are reading and notes that her test scores at the end of the year are on par or above everyone else's; the added bonus for her is that she knows her students will be lifelong readers.

I'm not going to be able to follow Miller's prescription for reading success exactly because we are on a canned, scripted curriculum.  I have to read from annotated teacher notes and slides made by someone else.  But I can adapt her practices into my classroom and given the stifling, mind-numbing curriculum, I think that free-reading will be welcome.

In other words, there is no better time for me to begin this project.

Miller writes: "The institutional focus on testing and the canned programs drains every ounce of joy from reading that students have or will have in the future.  We have turned reading into a list of 'have to's,' losing sight of the reality that students and adults are more motivated by 'want to's.'"

That is so true.  Every lesson, every task, is geared to the test.  There is absolutely zero reading for the pure pleasure of it.  Zero.  In fact, what my students are required to read is dry enough to turn them off of reading forever.

As I've stated before, morally, that's just wrong to me as a teacher.  I can't spend the entirety of my career putting nothing but dry, "informational texts" in front of my students and directing them to highlight them in various colors.

I'll cover what I'm required to cover but my students are also going to read for fun.

The research that supports independent reading is massive.  MASSIVE.  How can we ignore this?  But that's exactly what these scripted curriculum programs do.  Miller points out that readers are better at writing, have "richer vocabularies, and increased background knowledge in social studies and science."

Miller is not a fan of the whole class novel, and I can see the merit in this.  After teaching certain novels whole class, it is true that your readers are going to read through the novel, finish it and be bored long before the struggling readers do.  This results in wasted time for those faster readers; even worse: they are rewarded by being assigned extra busy work just because they finished quickly.   The goal of the whole class novel becomes just to finish it and complete the worksheets and projects that go with it.

Yes, there are things everyone should read: I fully believe that every student should read To Kill a Mockingbird, but I no longer believe it must be done whole class or on the same schedule.  We don't read that way in the real world, so why should we do it that way in school?

Miller's book was an eye-opening read; much of what she wrote I already knew but had not articulated in my mind.  She has used free reading in her class for years and her program works for her.  My plan is to make it work for me and for my students.

I am anxious to get back into my classroom and get this library set up!

Next on my summer reading list is Teach Like a Pirate by Dave Burgess.  Since I only have three weeks I better get after it!

If you'd like to send a book for our classroom library, here is the Wish List link!

"Can I Read This?": A Teacher's Dream Comes True

Summer

Today is the official first day of summer but technically I am about halfway through my summer vacation!  We report back to work on August 6; I'm not quite ready to think about that yet, but what I'm really thinking about a lot is my classroom library project.

After twenty-three years of teaching, I'm starting a classroom library.  I've written about it on this blog here, here, and here.  I've done a lot of reading and research about this and while we have an excellent school library, research also shows that having a classroom library sends a message of literacy and a love of reading to students.

From the National Council of Teachers of English statement on Classroom Libraries:

Classroom libraries—physical or virtual—play a key role in providing access to books and promoting literacy; they have the potential to increase student motivation, engagement, and achievement and help students become critical thinkers, analytical readers, and informed citizens As English language arts educators, we know that no book is right for every student, and classroom libraries offer ongoing opportunities for teachers to work with students as individuals to find books that will ignite their love for learning, calm their fears, answer their questions, and improve their lives in any of the multiple ways that only literature can.  

 For these reasons, we support student access to classroom libraries that 1) offer a wide range of materials to appeal to and support the needs of students with different interests and abilities; 2) provide access to multiple resources that reflect diverse perspectives and social identities; and 3) open up opportunities for students, teachers, and school librarians to collaborate on the selections available for student choice and reading.

Read the entire statement here.

I've always had a bookshelf in my room with old paperbacks on it, but one day in March one of my reader-students was peering at the shelves longingly.  She found a Stieg Larsson book that wasn't too beat up and pulled it out, asking if she could read it.

"Of course you can!"  I said.

She beamed at me with a radiant smile and stayed after class to talk about books she had read that she really liked and every book she had read, I had not.  That's when I realized I needed to up my Young Adult (YA) reading game.

How had I been so clueless?  So focused on tests and curriculum that I had missed for all these years this very obvious way to connect with my students?

That student read the Stieg Larsson book, brought it back, but didn't find another in my old, beat up mass-market paperbacks with their crumbling, yellowing pages that interested her.  Why would she?  Those books were years out of date, in poor condition, and of subject matter that did not connect with young people today.  They were cast-offs nobody wanted.

I started culling books and what I ended up with to retain was pathetic.

The Classroom Library Project was born.

I started researching.  And reading.  And begging.

And just from my readers of this blog and from my personal friends, we have collected about 125 brand new or very gently used books that will totally engage almost all of my students!  I've been amazed at the response!

"Amazed" isn't the right word.  I've been brought to tears by it, really.

Books donated for the Library!  Love!

This project has obsessed my thoughts; I stay awake at night thinking, "I really need to get those soccer books; those boys would read those," or "Do I have enough graphic novels?  I think I only have one or two?" (Note to self:  add some Spanish language books!)

I've spent two weeks in my classroom after the end of the school year doing a decoupage project on a

Pages from To Kill a Mockingbird cover this shelf.

donated bookshelf, and painting another donated bookshelf, so I can properly display these books in a way that will encourage my students to read them.  I've laminated hardback book covers to protect them, and covered softback books with clear Contact paper for protection.  I've entered every book in a database and I've put book pockets and cards in the back of every book.

And I keep updating my Amazon Wish List weekly so I can be certain that I'm covering every subject, every topic, every level of reader, because even though I get new students each semester, I know my kids and I know what they want to read.  I also know what I need on those shelves to pull in the kid that has not read a book since elementary school.

Let me share with you a conversation with one of my classes which took place about three days before the end of the school year.

I'd been gathering books, covering them, and stowing them in crates until the new school year.  One of the books on my desk was one I was reading because I'd heard so much about it on social media in my ELA Teachers Group; the book is The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas.

The book is amazing.  Now, I'll admit, I'm ah avid reader but I've never read much YA lit.  But this book?  Wow.  The basic plot as described on Amazon is this:

After Starr and her childhood friend Khalil, both black, leave a party together, they are pulled over by a white police officer, who kills Khalil. The sole witness to the homicide, Starr must testify before a grand jury that will decide whether to indict the cop, and she's terrified, especially as emotions run high. By turns frightened, discouraged, enraged, and impassioned, Starr is authentically adolescent in her reactions. Inhabiting two vastly different spheres—her poor, predominantly black neighborhood, Garden Heights, where gangs are a fact of life, and her rich, mostly white private school—causes strain, and Thomas perceptively illustrates how the personal is political: Starr is disturbed by the racism of her white friend Hailey, who writes Khalil off as a drug dealer, and Starr's father is torn between his desire to support Garden Heights and his need to move his family to a safer environment. The first-person, present-tense narrative is immediate and intense, and the pacing is strong, with Thomas balancing dramatic scenes of violence and protest with moments of reflection.

True Confession here:  I avoided reading the book for a while thinking, things like "that's not what

The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas

kids need to read about..." or "that will only encourage and incite divisive thinking...".  Boy was I wrong.  I could not have been more wrong.  And I can't tell you how hard it is to admit that I thought that way.

So, back to that classroom conversation. I was about halfway through the book when one of my girls saw it on my desk and asked me about it.

"What is that book?" she asked, based on the cover.

I stopped whatever material I was covering and picked it up.  I paged through it a moment and then turned the cover to the class and asked, "Have y'all read this?  Have y'all heard about this book?"

Not one had.

Nobody.

Zero.

I said, "Oh my gosh, y'all have GOT to read this book!  It's amazing!"

I started to tell them about the characters, about the story.  I talked about how Starr is a black girl but her parents send her to a white school that is safer and provided a better education.  I tell them about how her friend Khalil gets shot even though he did nothing wrong.  I tell her about Starr's friends and their parents who won't let them spend the night at Starr's house because she still lives in 'the bad part of town'.

As I talked, every kid was listening.  Everyone that had been staring at a phone, tuning out my discussion of Macbeth, looked up at me.  They asked questions.  Some wanted to hold the book and look at it.  They wanted to read it.

They wanted to read it.

Is the book Macbeth?  Of course not.  But a classroom library with a diverse selection of books enables every kid's voice to be heard and enables those conversations to be held in the security of the classroom.  I'm stocking my library with their voices and their stories. It gives us a chance to have these very important conversations with kids.

I'm stocking this library with everything from urban fiction to classic literature.  I want there to be something on those shelves for every single kid.

Consider this statement on the diversity of your classroom library from Education Week (emphasis mine):

Literature should be a window into possibilities beyond our own experiences. But it should also be a clear and vibrant mirror. As things are, a talking rabbit stands a better chance of seeing herself reflected in children’s literature than a child of color does. Roughly 73 percent of the characters in children’s books published in 2015 were white, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Cooperative Children’s Book Center. This appalling statistic should make every one of us angry.  

 What can we do about that profound problem? First, we need to find books that reflect the identities and experiences of our African-American, Latino and Latina, Asian-American, and Native American students. There aren’t enough of those books being published by the industry, but they do exist. 

If you have even one student of color in your class, she needs to see herself reflected in the books you put in her hands. White students need to read books about characters of color, too—in a world where neighborhoods, churches, and schools tend to be largely segregated, books can be a portal into the experiences of children whose lives are very different from those of the reader.

And scripted curriculum or not, I'm going to find a way to make certain that we have time to read in class, for pleasure, for fun. It's that important.

So here at this halfway point in my summer, I'm not quite halfway to my goal of 500 books by August 6, when school starts.  I have a really great start on it, but I'm not stopping until I get there.

I'm not stopping.

I'll be hitting thrift stores, garage sales, and shopping Amazon sales.  I'm applying for grants, entering contests,begging for donations, and sharing my Amazon Wish List every chance I get.  And I'll be spending a lot of my own money.

I hope some generous philanthropist will see it somewhere on social media and say, "Hey, let me help this lady! This is a great cause!" and will buy up everything on that Wish List!  (Hey, I can dream...).

Anyone know a generous philanthropist you can share this with?

Really, I do want to thank all of you who have sent books!  You're making my dream come true and you are helping kids that you don't even know and it doesn't get any better than that.  It's about kids, really.

And I'll be sharing their love of these books with you once school begins.

Read on!



Further Reading:
Four Steps to a Magnificent Classroom Library (Education Week, June 2018)
The Hate U Give Enters the Ranks of Great YA Novels (The Atlantic, March 2017)

There's a Sad, Empty Bookshelf in M205 (SIGIS 5/11/18)

M205 Library Update: You Guys ROCK!  (SIGIS 5/14/18)

We Are Up to 73 Books!  (SIGIS 5/22/18)
Statement on Classroom Libraries (NCTE)

End of School Year Reflection (or the Burrito of Gratitude, with a nod to Colene)

The last day of the school year finally arrived and I am officially on summer vacation.  We go back to school August 6, which I know will be here in a heartbeat.

This year has been both the longest and the quickest year of my 23-year career.

It began with a series of workshops and in-services throughout the summer last year which served to introduce us to a drastically new curriculum which we were mandated to implement "with fidelity" this year.  It was so radically different from what we have been doing that this was a terribly stressful objective to me.  I'm "old school" in many ways and teaching without a textbook and following a script has been hard for me.

I am also a rule follower and so while I wanted to follow my mandate, I'll admit publicly right now that I did not always follow the script.  I tried.  We are on block schedule and so our academic year is made up of two semesters: I have one group of students from August through December, and then new ones from January through May.

First semester I tried really hard to do that first unit as prescribed.  It took less than two weeks for the light in my students' eyes to go out and for them to start eyeing me with dread. I stuck with it and supplemented more engaging lessons where  I could while teaching all the same standards.  Second semester it was much the same. I was a little more comfortable with the new curriculum, but it is still mind numbing and dull. Nothing but annotation, graphic organizers, and Cornell Notes.  All day, every day.

But, it's the curriculum and I have to follow it if I want to keep my job.  To me it's almost a moral dilemma: do I kill the love of learning by shoveling more copies of speeches and more worksheets at them while reading scripts from prepared slides?  Or do I subvert the system, close the curtains, and teach from the heart?  I've spent the entire semester questioning myself and my career.

That's what made the semester long.

What made the semester go by too quick was my students.  I love them.  I love them with my heart!  As they were leaving yesterday I had so many hug me goodbye and wish me a happy summer.  We're talking high school kids: not the little elementary ones who hug so easily.  I had students from previous semesters come by just for a hug.  Mikayla brought me a doughnut! Teyniah made a card for me!  So did Te'asia!  Maria (who I taught last semester), came down the stairs with her ponytail and her shy smile and reached out for a hug.  My heart melted and my eyes still get misty when they go.

We don't have a PTA at our school, wealthy parents, or big booster clubs that bring teachers expensive gifts at the end of the year like some other schools.  At our school we don't get gifted Chromebooks, televisions, or cruises like other schools.  Nobody will ever gift me an Apple Watch. We don't even get cute coffee mugs and Starbucks cards.

But these parents give us their children and I swear that's all I need at the end of the year.  That hug, that home made card, that single doughnut in a styrofoam bowl is all I need to reassure me that I'm in exactly the right place.

I love our kids and I love our school.

Today, we had a rare teacher work day which was glorious!  I was gifted two bookshelves from one of my teacher friends and I spend the entire day refurbishing them.

The first one was bright pink:

This is too pink for me.

...and now it is teal blue.  I'm just not a pink kind of girl.

Progress. Calming blue.

That bulletin board is going to get a makeover this summer, too.

The other shelf was beat up wood:

This might be the perfect shelf.

and now it is on its way to being covered in the pages from To Kill a Mockingbird.

I figured why not?  We aren't allowed to read novels any more in class and this is the only way I can get my favorite book in the room!  Boom!

To Kill a Mockingbird: one page at a time

Once I finish the inside I will polyurethane the entire thing and it will be fabulous.

It was relaxing and fun to be engaged in these DIY projects today.  We all moved around from room to room, visiting with each other (something teachers so seldom are able to do!).  Nikki brought a pan of banana pudding around to share with everyone.  Samantha came and ate her lunch in my room.  Emily came by with Colene to look at my bookshelf.  Macie came in to visit while I painted and Karrie and I ate lunch in my room.  There was a lot of laughter and fun.  I love my co-workers!

I went to Colene's room and watched her organize papers, in the library Stacy had her daughter's dance recital on video to show us, and in the lounge we all gathered for breakfast burritos from Sonic.

All in all it was a really nice day, reconnecting with my friends and doing just the smallest bit of prep work for next year.  My shelf isn't finished, but I guess neither am I.  I'm still learning and still growing as a teacher every year.

What I learned today is that no matter how badly I might fundamentally disagree with certain things, I will always find a way to stand up for my students and do right by them because that's what matters to me more than anything else.  I go to work everyday exactly where I want to and I will never need expensive thank you gifts from booster clubs or parents to make my job more more rewarding.

My students, their smiles, and the occasional breakfast burrito are all I need!

Now, it's time to decompress and take a little time off!

Previously:
An Open Letter to Hal Braswell
Full of Promise: Bossier Bearkats Receive their Tickets to the Future
The SIGIS Summer Begins
Bearkat Pride Forever

There's a Sad, Empty Bookshelf in M205

(This is a repost of the exact same post from a day or two ago; for some reason all the links disappeared and could not be fixed, so I just copied and pasted the entire post and for now anyway, the wish list links work, but I lost the comments.  Very strange).

This is the bookshelf in my classroom that is to be my classroom library.  I've culled most of the books from it that had pages falling out or missing covers.

Most of what is left is pretty dated, with a few exceptions.

I wrote yesterday about my desire to create a classroom library with the hope of increasing literacy and my students' vocabulary.  I did an informal survey of all of my students and was shocked at how few of them read outside of school or can even remember or discuss the last book they read outside of school for the simple enjoyment of reading.

Under the Common Core curriculum, students no longer read entire novels in class; we only read selected chapters or non-fiction articles.  Along the way, students have fallen out of love with reading.  Most of them tell me that they used to read in elementary school but just stopped.

I want my students to be life long readers, not just test takers, so it's important to me that I can offer them a book to read just for fun that is engaging and that might grow their enthusiasm about reading.

We do have a terrific school library, but I think that a classroom library sends a message to a student that literacy and reading is important.  Some students will never take the time to go browse the school library but they might pick up a book in a classroom library, particularly if the teacher highlights some of those books and encourages students to read.

I need to fill these shelves with some new books so that when school starts in August I'll have a terrific classroom library to offer my students.

To fill these shelves I've created an Amazon wish list.  I'm still adding to it, but I want to share it with you in the hope that we can stock these shelves and fill them with engaging, interesting books for my students by August.  

In fact, I hope I have to bring in more shelves!

I'm including links for some of the books below in case you'd rather not go to the wish list.

And if you can't send us a book today, please share this post or the list.  If enough people see this then I know people will help!

The students of M205 thank you, and I thank you!

Raising Reading Scores and NAEP: We Can Only Go Up

I've been thinking about my students a lot lately; more so than usual, after looking at the latest NAEP scores which I wrote briefly about here.

To recap, Louisiana is once again at the bottom, or near bottom, of the list.  In reading, only 25% of our students are "proficient." We are tied at 48 with Mississippi; New Mexico is ranked 50 at 24%.

This really bothers me.

So, what does that score mean?  What, exactly, is "proficient?"

Proficient is defined this way:

When it comes to reading, eighth-grade “students performing at the Proficient level should be able to provide relevant information and summarize main ideas and themes,” says NCES. “They should be able to make and support inferences about a text, connect parts of a text, and analyze text features. Students performing at this level should also be able to fully substantiate judgments about content and presentation of content.”

About the same time I started fretting about the NAEP results, I came across this article on the Cult of Pedagogy blog urging teachers to "stop killing reading."

And in that article, the author referenced a book called Readicide by Kelly Gallagher, which I immediately ordered and have now read.

Gallagher's book was so on point I kept highlighting passages and sharing them with colleagues.

In my twenty-three year career I've seen more than a few kids who don't like to read, have never voluntarily read a book, and have no idea where the school library is.  I may not ever turn those kids into bookworms who read three books a week, but at least I have always been able to get them to admire the artistry and message of To Kill a Mockingbird or to relate themes in The Great Gatsby to the real world around them.

Sometimes that admiration is grudging, but it always comes.  It has been one of the highlights of my teaching career to see that light bulb go off over a kid's head when he grasps the symbolism of Mrs. Dubose's camellias or Atticus's shooting of Tim Johnson, the rabid dog.  If you've never seen that happen, that light bulb thing, it's amazing and it warms you all over to know that something great has just rattled the brain cells in that kid and a new understanding of the world around him has occurred.

Maybe I'm overstating it, but I don't think so.

I think Kelly Gallagher advocates for student readers and for teaching the classics quite admirably in his book when he writes:

"When every student in the country reads Romeo and Juliet, it means we all acquire a shared cultural literacy, a sharing that is foundational if we, as a culture are going to be able to communicate with one another."

And earlier in the book, he points out that "Reading Animal Farm is not simply an unusual trip to an English farm; Orwell's classic presents our students with the opportunity to discuss what happens when a citizenry fails to pay attention to its leadership."  It makes students think about the world around them.

The ironies with Fahrenheit 451 are obvious, right?  (But how will kids today know that?  They only read parts of this novel, if at all).

Gallagher's point is that the classic novels we teach in school provide opportunities for students to "rehearse" real world situations and ideas, an opportunity to become wiser under the leadership of a teacher.

It's a valid point.  But beyond the classics, he argues, we also need to provide opportunities for students to read for fun.  Many, many students do not read for the pure enjoyment of getting lost in a book and this is especially true with our underprivileged kids or children that come from impoverished homes.  They come to us with what Gallagher refers to as "word poverty" and spend their entire educational experience trying to catch up.

Why wouldn't we give them every opportunity to do so?

Because we are teaching the test. That's why.

There.  I said it.

Go back to those NAEP results.  We spend all of our time now putting articles and passages in front of students like those that they will see on a test.  We inundate them with multiple choice questions.  We highlight and close read and analyze and use sticky notes and we fill out graphic organizers, we analyze some more, we pick and pick and prod and well, it's no wonder that kids begin to hate to read.

We don't give them "books" any longer, we give them "chunks of text."

We don't give them the freedom to read as long as they wish ("If they want to read the entire novel they can do that on their own, outside of school!").  Instead, we give them chopped up passages to endlessly analyze. Where's the fun?  Where's the engagement?  Where's the love in that?

Gallagher talks about this practice a great deal in his book and its worth your time to read it if you're concerned at all about what Common Core and endless test prep is doing to kids.

The bottom line is that we really should be more interested in creating lifelong readers in our students.  They will carry a love of books and reading forever, long after that test score is gone.

Do we really want a generation of kids who have read nothing but passages and articles?

Imagine a world where cultural references such as "Beware the Ides of March!" are meaningless!  Or "Stay gold, Ponyboy...stay gold."  It breaks my heart to turn my sophomores out into the world never having encountered Mayella Ewell or Atticus Finch.  To Kill a Mockingbird is now "summer reading" in our district for freshmen and The Grapes of Wrath is "summer reading" for sophomores.  Imagine the loss at tackling either of those on your own as a young teenager!

Some districts know that they will likely never return to reading full novels in class again.

Instead, under Common Core, (which in Louisiana is called Louisiana Believes), students read selected chapters of books, or articles about books.  In tenth grade, for example, you read only the Prologue of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and then lots of articles about ethics.

You get the idea.

It's my belief, and I believe there is science and data (that ever present golden key - data) - to back me up, that kids who read a lot are better writers and have a much more developed vocabulary.  They are more rounded.  They are better equipped to deal with the unknown.  So, teach a kid to read for fun, and you've created something truly wonderful and given that kid a lifelong gift.

Is that enough to raise NAEP scores?  Probably not.  There are a lot of other factors that go into those scores: poverty, parental involvement, technology access, life-trauma, environment, etc.  Those scores reflect a whole plethora of factors beyond reading comprehension.

But hey, we've got no place to go but up.  Let's bring reading back into the curriculum.  And I mean reading fiction (we currently read about 75% non-fiction in grade 10 ELA), long books, novels, not just "chunks of text" or Xeroxed passages.  We need to give kids time to read IN SCHOOL and not just on their own.  What tenth grader can truly grapple with  The Grapes of Wrath without some help?!

My bottom line:  Kids need time to read, time without having to organize, annotate, highlight, determine this or that - just time to read to get lost in the pages.

Do that, and I guarantee we will have smarter kids; now, whether the test scores reflect that or not is a whole 'nother kettle of fish, as they say.

Louisiana Drops in Latest NAEP Report Card

It is disturbing to note the drop in Louisiana's achievement in the recently result NAEP scores: Louisiana finished 50th in eighth grade math and 48th in reading.  We dropped from previous years, if that's even possible.

Will Sentell at The Advocate sums it up:

In the latest snapshot of education achievement, scores for Louisiana public school fourth-graders plunged to or near the bottom of the nation in reading and math. In addition, eighth-graders finished 50th among the states and the District of Columbia in math and 48th in reading.  

The exams, which sparked controversy this time, are called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. Math, reading and other results make up what organizers call the nation's report card.  

In 2015, fourth-graders finished 43rd in the U. S. in reading and 45th in math.  But both scores dropped five points – to 212 and 229 out of 500 respectively – during tests administered to 2,700 students last year. That means fourth-grade math scores finished 51st while fourth-grade reading scores are 49th. The group that oversees the exams, the National Center for Education Statistics, said both drops are statistically significant. The results were also at odds with other states, where most scores were unchanged from 2015 in both subjects and both grades.

State Superintendent John White blames this drop on the fact that the exams were done online for the first time (which begs the question, why are we doing ACT testing online, then?).

What's the problem?  What are we doing wrong in this state with regard to education?

Actually, it's not just this state.  Pretty much the only state that made gains was Florida.

The Common Core State Standards are alive and well nationwide despite what Betsy DeVoss or anyone else might tell you.

Most states are still using CCSS, they're just calling it something less toxic than "Common Core."

Whatever they are called, it doesn't work.

At the simplest level, Common Core is basically scripted lessons and sterile, canned PowerPoint slides that are geared to teaching the test.  With a scripted lesson there is little or no room for teacher creativity, spontaneity or individualized instruction. It is relentless standardized testing.

Given that Common Core is still with us, despite what your state is calling it, this article at The Hill goes a step further to point out that the CCSS are not only failing our kids but are especially failing at risk kids; if one of the goals of Common Core was to "close the achievement gap" it looks as if we can call that one a bust:

But in fact, the NAEP results show the achievement gap is actually growing. According to John Engler, chairman of NAEP’s governing board, “We are seeing troubling gaps between the highest- and lowest-performing students.” It’s logical to attribute this decline directly in part to Common Core. The standards embrace student-centered “discovery” learning, where the teacher acts as more facilitator than instructor. 

Especially for disadvantaged students, that pedagogy doesn’t work. Project Follow Through, the largest and most extensive government education study in history, proved this by following tens of thousands participant children for years to determine the best means of educating them. The answer was direct instruction — an approach disfavored in Common Core.

For the 2017-18 school year, Louisiana implemented its own version of Common Core and these Guidebooks are hosted on the LearnZillion website.  The results are mixed; it's a work in progress.

It will be interesting to see if this helps our students in the next NAEP examination.

It's clear that Louisiana needs to do something better than what we are doing for our kids; scoring at the bottom of the list, and continuing to fall, is not acceptable.

Further reading:
Education report card shows Common Core still fails US students
Does Common Core hurt minority students the most?
NAEP shows little to no gains...
Teacher made lessons make inroads
Prepared remarks by Betsy DeVoss - January 2018
Nation's Report Card: Something very good is happening in Florida
NAEP and John White's computer testing hypocrisy
How has school reform worked in Louisiana?