A couple of other teachers were sitting by me in the bleachers at the middle school gym on Saturday. We were watching our daughters play indoor soccer. The girls’ soccer coach keeps stats on all of the players. We were watching him make notes on his clipboard, and I began thinking about all of the data that I had on hand for the parent-teacher conferences we just finished.

When parents come to formally meet with us we have about 15 - 20 minutes to say whatever is going to be said. In some cases this may be the only conversation I have with these people. I think that most parents believe they are going to find out how their kid is doing. What they may not realize is that I am gathering information that is far more valuable than anything I have to tell them. Since I know they want to hear about their kid, I try to have a few things on hand to show them. I think of it as show and tell. The artifacts serve as a direct indication of what the student does in school - data, in other words. But I also ask parents to tell me what they see as their child’s strongest area of need, and their greatest strength. I get a lot of insight into family priorities this way. Only rarely do we go through every piece of paper I saved for them to look at. Those are just props, anyway. By the time we wrap up the meeting, I have a pretty good idea about how much support there is and what the expectations are for each student at home.

At the soccer game I jokingly mentioned that I should be keeping a record of EVERYTHING that happens all day long in the classroom so that I could tell parents exactly what each kid was doing every minute. It seems like if I could just boil everthing down to a number: minutes in the bathroom, time spent reading, words written, words spoken, etc. I would be able to provide a much more succinct and objective picture of each kid’s real performance. Gary mentioned that in his masters program he had to do teacher action research and gather data, but then he couldn’t teach. “I know,” I told him. “When I’ve done that I end up with scraps of paper and checksheets on clipboards all over the place, and they are meaningless. Then the kindergarten teacher said that her school was required to adopt a totally scripted reading program because they failed to make adequate yearly progress on benchmark testing. Those scripted programs tell the teacher exactly what to say throughout the lesson. One of the problems with them, however, is that the kids don’t have a copy of the script. I asked her if the teachers voted on it. She said they did, but they didn’t realize exactly what they were voting for when they chose it. The clincher was that the reason they failed to make the grade was because of one severely disabled student.

I couldn’t resist. I would rather be a heretic than a clone, so at the mention of No Child Left Behind, I proclaimed, “I am ACTIVELY leaving kids behind!” I don’t like doing it, but I do it anyway. I’m a realist. When I think about all of the real challenges being faced by the students and families I work with, I can’t imagine doing otherwise. Why should all of my students care about state educational standards? There are no standards to guarantee kids a peaceful nurturing home-life. Many kdis are happy to have a warm safe place to be each day at school. Learning to read and write well enough to pass a standardized test is low on their list of concerns. And you know what? NOT ONE parent asked me about the state standards. Nobody wanted to know if their kid would be ready for the big test. The majority were concerned with handwriting and spelling. A few wanted to see their kids improve in math. One thought it would be good if her son read some more challenging books. Good for all of them! Those are all worthy goals. They are goals that I share as well. And I will pursue them.

We have our work cut out for us. If parents can’t get their kids to write neatly, and that is their primary educational concern, we have a long long long way to go before I can stop leaving kids behind. I need to focus on the real concerns of the people I work with. Standards are for pencils, not kids. Pencils are standardized so they can all fit the sharpeners. Kids are being standardized so they can all fit the workplace. But standards will never work for all people because people come from places that are far from standard. Parent conferences remind me that Washington DC is neither near, nor far enough away from my classroom. The kids need me to help them find a way through the system, and the government wants me to service its institutional policy. I can effectively do neither if I try to do both.

The tyranny of statistics has victimized us all. Even the soccer players won’t know if they played a good game until the coach analyzes his stats.