On Tuesday night, just hours after the High School Assessment test scores were released across Maryland, this ninth-grade English teacher was on the telephone describing the usual day. Some of his students had enough energy to run sprints around the room. Some held high-decibel conversations during tests. One put his head on his desk and slept. This was considered a blessing.
The statewide testing gave us a variation on a theme: Kids in the healthy school districts, such as Howard and Harford and Anne Arundel counties, did real well, and those in the city of Baltimore showed some improvement but lagged behind most areas.
The fellow on the phone teaches English in the northeastern part of the city. That is, he teaches when he can. Such as the moment he was lecturing a class the other day, when one of his young scholars got up, walked across the room, and commenced conversation with a classmate.
“What are you doing?” the teacher asked. “You can’t just walk across the room.”
“I was just getting something.”
Or, while the rest of the class was taking a test, another student strikes up a conversation with the kid sitting next to him, who’s trying to focus on the exam.
“James, what are you doing?”
“Why you gotta single me out?” James replies.
James doesn’t want to take the test, that’s all, so he figures he’ll chatter away. And the teacher can’t force him, can’t make him look at the page and try to identify which words are adjectives, and which ones are nouns. The best he can do is attempt to keep the kid pacified.
“You have to pick your battles,” the teacher says. “He doesn’t want to take the test, so I don’t push it. What’s the alternative? A kid puts his head down and goes to sleep. You don’t want to get into a yelling match. Do I disrupt class for the other 20 kids just so I can go to war with this one kid? I’m trying to handle one, and two others start acting out. I feel like I’m doing air traffic control.”
“That particular test,” the teacher was asked. “It was about parts of speech?”
“Right. Nouns and pronouns, modifiers.”
“And they can identify these?”
“A little,” he says. “Grammar’s de-emphasized a lot now. Most of them know a noun when they see it. You ask them to identify a pronoun, an adjective, or an adverb, they’ll point to a word and say, ‘That one?’ ‘No.’ ‘That one?’ ‘No.’ Until they finally come to the right one.”
“Parts of speech can be tough.”
“That’s only part of it,” he says. “You can’t take anything for granted when you’re trying to make a point. I used the word ‘gullible’ the other day. I used it for every one of my classes. I had one kid in each class who knew what the word meant. I said, ‘If I tell you there’s a space ship that just went flying past here, and you believe me, you’re being gullible.’ Without that explanation, they had no idea.”
The High School Assessment tests are basic-skills exams given at the end of Algebra 1, biology, American government and sophomore English. Before they can graduate, students have to pass all four exams or earn a minimum combined score.
In the ninth-grade English teacher’s class, he’s already thinking about the test his students will take next year, when they finish sophomore English.
“Most of my kids,” he said, “are certainly not reading at grade level. And, realistically, being on grade level really means you’re one grade level behind. Some of my kids read at a seventh grade level. Some, not that high.”
“Then how do they get to the ninth grade?”
“Because you can’t fail everybody.”
Across the state, 83 percent of Maryland’s 54,628 seniors have, somewhere along the line, now met testing requirements for graduation. In Carroll County, 95 percent have now passed all their HSA tests, the best record in the state. In Howard and Harford counties, 93 percent. In Anne Arundel, 92 percent. In Baltimore County, 84 percent.
In the city of Baltimore, 65 percent.
“What people have to understand,” the teacher was saying now, “is that the kids aren’t the bad guys. Think about where they’re coming from. Very few with two parents at home. Some living with their grandmother, some of them with aunts. Then we have Parents Night. I wound up with six parents who showed up.”
“That’s it?”
“Are you kidding? The other teachers were going, ‘Wow, you had six?’ Most of them had one or two who showed up.”
Mostly, those are the ones struggling to pass those statewide tests.
