David looked happier than he has in years. His wife and son had both been seriously ill, and are, if not completely recovered, significantly better.
He’s lost weight, and quite evoked the urbane Victorian gentleman he volunteers to represent at Miramont Castle, where we were having tea. On the table next to David’s plate was a stud finder; he suspected there once was a hallway going through one of the walls in the complicated, many-times-rebuilt mansion, and he wanted to try to confirm the suspicion.
I dressed up, too, and wore a hat. We drank our Boulder Breakfast tea and caught up on our lives. Teacher friends tend to get out of touch during the hurly-burly of the school year, but in the summer we reconnect.
“I’m pretty sure we won’t score well on this year’s CSAP, either,” he mused, smearing a bit of Devonshire cream on his orange scone, “we’ll stay on the watch list for another year, and I don’t know what’ll happen.”
“Mmm, I don’t know either. It’s an annual tragedy for me, going through the process. My kids try so hard, it makes tears come to my eyes, but the learning disabilities they have make it so hard for them to understand the complicated language of the directions.
“Plus,” I continued, “over the years, I’ve come to believe it’s kind of insane to expect the kids to do their best on these tests, when how they perform doesn’t affect their lives one bit. Until we make their advancement in school somehow dependent on their progress on the tests, why in the world should they try? What do they get out of it?”
“Well, yeah, but the tests aren’t supposed to assess the kids, they’re supposed to evaluate the teachers and schools. And I guess now they’ll help to decide if we keep our tenure,” David said.
“And that’s a mystery to me, how they’ll make the decision in my case as a special educator,” I said.
“Some of my kids do OK on CSAP’s, but others stay in the unproficient range – but show progress, sometimes significant progress, on other nationally normed tests – so will they look at those, or will they decide on my tenure with just CSAP scores? Cause if they just look at the state test, I’m sunk.”
“It’s hard,” David agreed, “but I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing to make decisions on tenure based on how our kids score. I mean, in what other profession do you get to do an adequate job for three years, and then just skate for the rest of your career, anyway?”
We talked about the bad teachers we’d both observed, and moved on to other topics.
Later, after David found the historic passageway, we walked in the Miramont garden, and sat for a while longer on the chairs in the corner of the shaded lawn.
“Did you hear about District 2?” David asked.
I’d liked most of what I’d heard about the specific teaching elements evaluators in that district look for, in classrooms. But recently I’d been out of town, so he explained. A probationary teacher in District 2 had not had her contract renewed, despite evaluations that had indicated no deficiencies in her teaching.
“I guess Mike Miles (the superintendent) said that just because none of her evaluations were unsatisfactory, that doesn’t mean she was a satisfactory teacher,” David said. “But I thought that was kind of the definition of satisfactory – not unsatisfactory! I mean, it sounds like everyone told the teacher she was doing fine, and then all of a sudden she didn’t have a job. That doesn’t seem right.
“I dunno,” he shrugged, “we both love teaching…but would you go into the field now, knowing what you’d have to deal with?”
As we hugged good bye, my friend commented, “I just wish they’d tell us how they’ll evaluate us. Then I’d know what I need to do.”
Eva Syrovy (evasyrov@msn.com) of Colorado Springs is a special education teacher at the middle school level. She blogs at .
