Public expectations of fairness, consistency, or equity (42U.S.C.10705)

I prefer to keep my blog posts about my observations of the country around me, but since I have landed back in the classroom, it’s been harder and harder for me to ignore the issue of education in the United States. Recently, a fellow teacher, who is lucky enough to be teaching in international schools instead of U.S. public schools, posted an article relating to education that kept me awake one night. No doubt, he had posted the article as an inspiring example of what young people, especially girls, can bring to our world if given the chance. Indeed, Maria Elena Grimmett is a role model for us all, young and old, female and male.

But I got hung up on some information about Grimmett’s inspiration, particularly when she was quoted as saying, “There was only one science teacher in the entire middle school, and she didn’t think she could help all of us fairly, so that’s why it had to stop. I decided to continue on my own, leading me to the path I am on today.”

Almost immediately, I had as much sympathy for that middle-school teacher as I did admiration for Grimmett’s achievement. I especially felt the weight of that word “fairly.” The article, appropriately, does not go into what the teacher meant by “fairly,” and it occurred to me that it might take a whole other article just to explain the various aspects of “fairness” that might have influenced that teacher.

The fact that Grimmett mentions “only one science teacher in the entire middle school” suggests that the teacher was concerned about the fairness of time. Some simple data collection and analysis, the kind Grimmett could easily perform, reveals this teacher’s time constraints. According to data from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development in 2011, most states require 990 hours of instruction at the middle-school level. But for the sake of argument, let’s even consider the best-case scenario, Texas, which requires 1,260 hours. According to the Texas Education Code, public schools must squeeze those hours into at least 180 days, which means on average students spend 7 hours a day in instruction during the school year. Of course, science is not the only course in middle school, so those 7 hours are probably split among at least 6 classes; not accounting for any lunch or other breaks, that generously averages to 70 minutes per day in science class.

But within that single science class, there are multiple students. According to data from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development in 2009, the average class size in U.S. “lower secondary schools” is 24.3 students. Rounding down to 24, that means the teacher can spend slightly less than 3 minutes with each student during each class; teachers, who are realists, realize that this would be time spent inefficiently, so if the class were working on science-fair projects, they would probably split meetings with students over many days. But even if this teacher dedicated an entire week to the meetings, he or she would still only meet with each student for 15 minutes; in a whole month, it would be an hour.

An adequate science-fair project, one not nearly as ground-breaking as Grimmett’s, is going to require far more than 60 minutes of consultation time. To compensate, some schools creatively incorporate community volunteers and/or high-school students to act as after-school mentors. Of course, parents also could and should serve as mentors, but many have legitimate or tenuous reasons why they don’t have time to help at home. Nonetheless, society would expect this middle-school teacher to give up his or her after-school time to assist students, even if that teacher had a child of his or her own who needed help with a science-fair project.

But let’s say a teacher is willing to sacrifice his or her personal time to help students – and many of them are – there’s another consideration to make, about the fairness of curriculum. In the example above, even without the after-school hours, the teacher would be dedicating at least an entire month of class, and probably more, to a science fair. No doubt, a science-fair project is a great way to teach and learn a lot of concepts and applications related to science. Unfortunately, however, it does not encompass everything that students are required to learn.

According to the Texas Administrative Code, each middle-school grade level is required to achieve at least 11 categories of “knowledge and skills,” each of which has at least 2-6 subcategories, in science. For each grade, 3-4 categories are about “scientific investigation and reasoning,” objectives that likely could be achieved with a science-fair project. But the remaining 7-8 are more specific objectives related to foundations in physics, chemistry, and biology.

Most certified teachers trained in the art of differentiation will tell you that science-fair project topics should be selected by the students to maximize interest and achievement. It’s quite likely that some, if not many, of students’ selected topics would not match the state standards. So for the sake of argument, that means all the objectives not related to “scientific investigation and reasoning” would have to be taught during the other eight months of the year, to make sure everyone has been properly prepared for testing. Oh, and did I forget to mention that testing usually takes place in early April, so really, the teacher has only six months left?

From this point, it becomes a cost-benefit analysis. Is giving up personal and classroom time worth the risk of not being able to teach the rest of the material in time for the tests? This analysis is complicated by the fact that even that one month with the science fair might be wasted because demonstrating “scientific investigation and reasoning” knowledge on a written test is quite different than demonstrating “scientific investigation and reasoning” skills through an experiment, an adjustment that also must be addressed some time during classroom instruction.

Some teachers take the risk because they see the long-term consequences: It likely will benefit society much more in the future if a student can perform an experiment rather than ace a test. But there is certainly no benefit for the teacher. And this is yet another type of fairness a teacher has to consider: fairness of achievement. If too many students fail that test, it might or might not cost society, but it will definitely cost the teacher.

Luckily, right now, despite much talk about merit pay, most states and school districts have opted for incentive pay, not performance pay, meaning that teachers who meet goals for professional development or test-passing rates can earn bonuses or pay raises. However, in an industry where salaries are on the low side, forcing many teachers to find second or summer jobs, not earning this incentive pay is definitely a loss to a teacher. If states and school districts move to performance pay, basing salaries – and even jobs – solely on student outcomes, the cost for teachers will be that much higher.

The underlying impetus for testing – that all students should be able to perform at the same minimum level – has caused another crisis for teachers. Somehow, the idea of equality in terms of minimum ability has turned into equality in all areas. It is a real worry to a teacher, myself included, to be accused, possibly even in court, of being negligent toward one student simply by providing more or different resources to another. Of course, the amount and type of resources cannot be equal for all students, so say the principles of differentiation, once again.

But a science teacher giving additional instruction to someone as motivated as Grimmett is dangerous because it might give the appearance of not fairly (re: equally) devoting additional instruction to another student (who, incidentally, might prefer the extra attention in history instead). Conversely, the same rule does not apply to lower-achieving students; they are often given extra time and resources in order to ensure that they achieve the “minimum” standard of the tests. To wit, the science fair at Grimmett’s elementary school was “discontinued due to a lack of staff and resources,” a lack possibly created by diverting staff and resources to testing demands, including remedial instruction. Sadly, the notion of devoting that same extra time and resources to students who want to achieve beyond the “maximum,” like Grimmett, has diminished, disappeared, or, worse, been decried as favoritism.

And this last charge is what I believe deeply wounds most teachers because it accuses them of lacking the very characteristics that drove them to become teachers: a love for humanity. I honestly want to help every student who walks through my door. It is more of a struggle with some students than others, to be sure, but still, I want to make each of them better, even if it is in a small way or in a way unrelated to language arts. And by telling me that the only way I can achieve that is to ensure each of them can exhibit the exact same knowledge and the exact skills in the exact same way, the students are robbed of their humanity, too. By acknowledging my students’ differences and treating them “unequally” because of those differences, I am treating them like humans. I would bet that this middle-school teacher wanted to treat Grimmett humanely and help her continue on her path of scientific exploration, but instead, she had to treat her “fairly.”

In the article, Grimmett says her interest in science began in third grade because of “an inspiring teacher who was supportive of science projects.” This elementary-school teacher seems like the good cop, while the middle-school teacher seems like the bad cop. But trust me, both of these teachers have had their hearts broken and reputations smeared in recent years. Both are being asked to do the impossible: Make consistent conclusions in a situation with many variables – schedules, class sizes, staffing levels, resources, standards, tests, incentives, parents, administrators, and politicians.

As any good science-fair guide will tell you, for a “fair” test of a dependent variable, there should only be one independent variable. To fairly evaluate if teachers affect students, those other variables must be controlled. Instead, society seems to want to ignore how they might be contributing to the overall results in the experiment that is education, which unfortunately forces teachers into the impossible position of trying to bring “fairness” into their classrooms.