1 post from February 2009

    Holly Springs Summer School has all the potential in the world to be almost everything this article calls for in an effective program for struggling students. We aleady  structure the school to measure progress, and we already base our methods on research and evaluation. The primary deficiency comes not from the make-up of the program itself, but from the pull of teachers who work at the school. The fact that we’re all spread out over the entirety of the state of Mississippi makes it particularly difficult to collaborate with our summer students’ previous teachers—we can’t know what was already tried and unsuccessful, nor can we let their new teachers know what really worked for them over the summer session.
    Other than this, I envision a very smoothly-operating, work-oriented school, where all of the teachers can work collaboratively and creatively to challenge and push the students to previously uncharted heights academically. This sounds a little too grandiose, but I assure you it’s not. I have never been around a group of people (other than my college football team) who have been so easy to get along with and were all of one mind and purpose. We all have the same goal in mind—to see all of our students succeed and be prepared for the world ahead of them. But what exactly is success for our students in summer school? I’m sure this can and will be defined individually by each student and teacher in the building; but surely some overlap will exist. This overlap is where we can claim a common ground for defining success. Ultimately, the great success and drive of summer school is for each student to be able to apply the requisite knowledge specified by the state for their age and grade level—meaning we want every one of them to be able to pass the course. More than that, though, is that we want them to be prepared for the next year as well. We don’t simply want to give a boost to push them on to the next year. After all, how is that really different from social promotion anyway? What we want is for them to have the foundation to be successful in their next endeavor, whatever it may be. Success here can be measured through the same ways we measure success in the academic year, but it shouldn’t necessarily be that way all summer. Sure, sometimes we will need to give a test or a quiz, but these students are in summer school because they struggle with these conventional measures. We should give them alternative assessments, assignments that allow them to be creative in response so that they can show they know it without having the anxiety of a test. We can—and already are—preparing for this by designing creative lesson plans meant to serve a population of students who don’t learn best in the traditional classroom. We are planning activities and lessons that allow the visual learners to see new illustrations of concepts, our tactile learners to touch actual manipulatives, and our kinesthetic learners to move around the classroom.
My next definition of success might not be overlap with anyone else, but it certainly applies for my beliefs. I rely heavily on sports analogies; organized sports are my earliest memories, and this is my first year without playing them in as long as I can possibly remember, so that’s how I’ll try and make this illustration. In football, they say winning isn’t everything. I’m not sure who “they” are, but what “they” are referring to is the general advancement and strengthening of character, a moral fortification around what your Truths are, a sense that your worth in life is directly proportional to what you put into it and others. If knowledge is power, then your character is the instrument with which you wield your power. This has little to do with a summer school curriculum, but everything to do with being an educator. Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach speaks volumes for instilling fruitful virtues in students, and that this doesn’t have to cross some supreme court line, nor does it have to detract from your actual material you are teaching. One of my favorite quotations of all time if from John Maxwell’s Developing the Leader Within You where he writes, “You teach what you know, but you reproduce who you are.” This kind of success is nearly impossible to measure, but impossible to miss. You can see someone’s character in nearly everything (s)he does.
Making summer school a required part of a struggling student’s education poses many problems, the most obvious being how does a district define a struggling student? Are the children who make below a 70 all required to attend, but those who make above a 70 don’t have to go? Or should all struggling students go, including those in the “D” range of below 75? If this is the case, then making 70 a cut-off point for passing or failing is arbitrary. Why not just make everyone below 80 attend the summer school? What about the students who missed a good portion of the year, still aced the final exam with a perfect score, but never turned in homework; he clearly knows the material, but was just lazy. Will more schooling really help him with the basics?
I do agree wholeheartedly with the first point; social promotion and the retention rates are atrocious. I absolutely think these should be things of the past, but in order to do this, we have to help in other ways, and summer school, if done right, could be that way. Funding should be completely in place by the state. Making a student give up his/her summer vacation is often punishment enough, not to mention that fiscal responsibility is really not an option for any of my kids down here. None of them could come up with $200 to pay for summer school, so that would rest on the parent, who inevitably wouldn’t be able to come up with it either, and so the student wouldn’t attend, and would thus be retained anyway. State funding alleviates any of these problems and once again places the burden on the students’ own shoulders without making it a financial one. And of course every summer program should want the teachers with the most success in teaching struggling students—those are exactly the type you’ll see in summer school—and should want to pay them a healthy amount for their troubles and efforts in their time off.
States should keep some regulations, but again, it should leave wiggle-room for varying district needs. What should not go unregulated is the rigor with which the program should evaluate teaching strategies and student achievement.