Defying the Odds of Education

I have been told my whole life that my ideas were impossible to achieve, that I thought too big or that I needed to focus on more attainable goals. If I ever listened to other people, I would not have achieved the type of results I can talk about after 20 years in education.

The results should speak for themselves. All of my students had every external factor you could think of and every reason to fail in school. In fact, all of my students did fail in school. Because of federal special education law and New Jersey state protections, my students were afforded a second-chance at life.

Yes a second-chance at the age of 5 or 6. A second-chance at the age of 12 or 13. Think about that, my students were being given a second-chance because they failed their first chance. And they were only given a second-chance because they were classified with a disability. All of their non-disabled peers were not being given a second-chance, they were being forgotten completely by the school system, the society and by the government.

The results speak for themselves. My students were not expected to succeed.

I have watched as many TED Talks as I could on school leadership and how to help kids succeed and in most speeches I heard this phrase over and over again, "You have to raise the expectations and the students will meet it."

It sounds good! It does. But is that all it takes? The answer is no, it takes a lot more than that. Because it's not the student expectations that you have to change, the key to school improvement and student success is changing the ideology and mindset of the adults in the building. The adults need to change their expectations on what is possible.

The results speak for themselves. My students were below grade level, my students had processing and memory issues.

All of my students transferred to my program from public, charter and elite private schools. They failed in those settings. According to the law, those settings were deemed inappropriate learning environments. Because the students failed, the public, charter and elite private schools were no longer the "least restrictive environment."

All of my students faced external factors that made it easy to "explain" why they were failing. But all of my students were defying the odds and statistics. So my question to you, "what explains their success then?"

Reality only exists when we collectively agree on a set of boundaries and limits. For some reason, we have all agreed that urban kids, minority kids, special needs kids, low-income family kids, broken home kids, foster kids, homeless kids, kids overcoming abuse, neglect and trauma CANNOT achieve what others can achieve. It's ok for them to fail. It's understandable when they fail and we cannot BLAME them for their failures.

I agree with the last part. We cannot blame kids for failing in school. Student grades are the sole responsibility of the school.

I hope you caught that. Not the teacher. The SCHOOL! We need to stop thinking of teachers as one person. We need to stop putting teachers on an island and saying, "we'll see you in June, good luck!"

There are so many things about our K-12 school system that I cannot stand. There are so many things about our K-12 system that are so pointless and useless that it drives me crazy sometimes. There are so many things about our K-12 system that do not NEED to be the way they are, but the problem is that when someone like me comes along and starts to rattle the cage, and produces results that show how bad the K-12 system is and how much better it CAN BE - that the "status quo" and the K-12 machine comes over and tries to SILENCE ME.

The results speak for themselves. Despite my kids not being expected to succeed, they did.

Let me tell you about a student who started my school in the fourth grade. He was barely reading on a Kindergarten level. Because he was so far behind, he could not pay attention in class. It had nothing to do with his disability. It had to do with, imagine if I put you in a room for five hours and everyone was speaking a foreign language and gave you ZERO help or support. What would you do? Would you sit there quietly, day after day after day? Or at some point would you try and entertain yourself?

When he arrived at my school, I told the teacher to do whatever it took to make him feel welcome and supported. She knew he couldn't read the assignments so she sent everything home in an email to his Grandmother. Although he was doing no work in class, he never missed his homework. Isn't that interesting?

So I asked the teacher for an update a few weeks later and that was what she reported to me. So I asked her, "how is he doing his homework if he can't read the assignments?" But she did not know the answer. So I asked the student.

And this is what he told me, "when I get home, my grandmother allows me to play outside for an hour and then I have to do my homework. So I go on her email and she starred the teacher's email for me. I open it up and cut and paste the email and put it in Google Translate and it has a button that reads the email to me over the computer. Then it has the same button, I can speak to it. So I tell the translate my answer and then I cut and paste it back into the email and send it to the teacher."

If only you could have seen my face when he told me that story. My jaw dropped. My mouth was open. My eyes were wide. Can I get a collective, "Are you kidding me?"

Here is a student who no one expects to do any work. He is functionally illiterate. If he didn't do any work, no one would fault him. No one had any expectations at all. Here is a kid that everyone said was "unmotivated" to learn. In the public school, he got into fights every single day. With me, I was able to calm him down enough that it was only a one fight per week.

My teacher did not raise the expectations. No one "reached" him or forged a better relationship. The truth is that no one did anything. The only thing different that my teacher did was she emailed the work home.

Please recognize that the ONLY thing the teacher did was email the work home, his public school never thought of that idea.

But the teacher is NOT ALONE! Because the teacher sent the work home via email, and I followed up and talked with the student directly and asked, "how the heck are you doing your homework when you can't read it?" And by him telling me that UNREAL story about using Google Translate, this student's entire life CHANGED!.

That was the 4th Grade. I can recognize talent when I see it. I can recognize grit when I see it. I can recognize a kid that won't give up, when I see it. He was put into our reading coaching program five days a week, and my staff worked with him every day. They worked and I provided support and materials and resources and HOPE!

When he graduated high school, eight years later. He was reading on a 9th Grade Level and he was enrolled in the local community college. This was not supposed to happen.

He was not supposed to succeed. In his first IEP meeting in the 4th Grade everyone at the table that was an "expert" said that if he could reach a 4th grade reading level that would be considered a huge "win!" His grandmother cried.

I'm not sure what to say. I'm not sure I fully comprehend how people think. What I do know with certainty is that I do not think the way that most people do. I seem to see the world in a VASTLY different frame of reference.

The results speak for themselves. I shouldn't have to defend them. I shouldn't have to say anything. The results speak for themselves and yet, there is now a chorus of support for doubling down on Standardized Testing, and continuing to use this 19th Century (Industrial Age) curriculum for the next 10 years.

Am I missing something? If I am, please someone tell me the piece of information that I'm not seeing. I have done the research. According to Dr. Robert Marzano and Richard Paul and Bob Ennis to name a few, the best path to student success is teaching and focusing on higher order thinking skills.

If we look at Bloom's Taxonomy or Marzano's updated Taxonomy, we can see at the very top are the skills of "evaluating, analyzing and creating."

Every single CEO and Business Owner will tell you that if they cannot analyze, evaluate and create - their businesses go under.

But forget about business, what about teachers. On a daily basis, in fact, on a period by period basis, teachers are evaluating, analyzing and creating to help students achieve the lesson objective. Teachers evaluate the "check for understanding", they analyze student data and they create solutions and back-up plans to help struggling students to overcome challenges and obstacles in the classroom.

So then, why do districts allow their Common Core Standards and their 19th Century curriculum maps to continue to focus on Memorization and Understanding skills? I have heard all the arguments before, you have to scaffold the skills, you can't jump to higher order before you build the other skills, but I'm here to tell you that there is no evidence to support that theory.

The results speak for themselves. My 4th grade student had an issue with memory. He could remember about half what a non-disabled peer could in any one moment. And yet, he figured out how to cut and paste emails and put them into Google Translate and complete his homework assignment, when no one showed him how to do that.

Where was the scaffolding then?

I've been trying to launch a 22nd Century Curriculum Project. I am proud to say that Dr. Anthony Cavanna, former Associate Dean at Fordham University will be a key educator in that effort. His knowledge, experience and expertise are invaluable to school districts across the United States. But developing a 22nd Century Curriculum is useless, just as much as a 19th Century one is, if teachers are not writing lesson plans that focus on "higher order" thinking skills.

If lesson plans are not at least 80 percent "analyzing, evaluating and creating."

When you shift focus of the classroom to these three higher order thinking skills a lot of decision change in the classroom. Here's just one example:

If students are expected to analyze, evaluate and create in class, spending an entire class period reading a book together becomes a HUGE waste of class time. Spending time forcing the students to fill in a graphic organizer becomes another waste of class time.

When we focus on "analyzing, evaluating and creating" we begin to show respect to the student as a person with a brain and expect them to think critically about the class and the world. As such, we should be giving them pre-filled graphic organizers, we should not be asking them to do vocabulary "look up", but just provide them with the words and definitions they need to know.

I have done over 10,000 lesson observations in my career and the lessons that drove me up a wall were the ones where the "objective" of the lesson was for the students to FIGURE out what the teacher was trying to teach them. The ah-ha moment was when the students figured out what was going on inside the teacher's mind. We need to stop making classrooms a mystery-puzzle for kids to solve. That is a waste of everyone's time. In essence, it was an elaborate game of charades.

If you have read this far, I want you to contact me. On here, or on Instagram @rewardspro. Just send me a direct message. I want to hear from you because I need to know that I'm not alone. Our current K-12 system is really good at isolating educators, making them feel like they are alone.

My dream is to build a community for teachers, by teachers. And what means is once we have a 22nd Century Curriculum that eliminates racism and bias in schools, that together we can write lesson plans and provide support to teachers across the country. There is nothing stopping teachers from Oregon supporting teachers in Florida. Our K-12 system wants our nation to think that teaching is an easy job. The "status quo" wants the public to believe that teachers are paid for their work.

The sad truth is that teachers work overtime every week without overtime pay. The sad truth is that teachers are not allowed to teach, but are required to do "other" jobs and roles in the classroom that distract from learning.

My dream is to find 1000 teachers who want to write "higher order" lesson plans with me, and make an extra $10,000. There are two million teachers on Teachers Pay Teachers, if there are 1000 teachers uploading lessons on that site and not making $10,000, please contact me.

I see the world differently. I can't explain why. My hope is that other people like the way I see the world.