A 3rd Grade Teacher’s Message to State and National Education Leaders: What You’re Missing About Learning Loss
Last Tuesday, at 9:47 a.m., I knelt down next to Mia’s desk while the rest of my 3rd grade class worked through a state-released practice reading passage about the life cycle of honeybees. The classroom heater had been stuck on high since the January ice storm, so half the kids had their snow boots kicked off under their desks, and the air smelled like cherry lip balm and crumbs from the granola bars we’d snuck in before the bell. Mia’s eraser was worn down to a nub, and her paper had three holes rubbed straight through the answer section. Her fingernails were smudged with blue crayon from decorating her name tag earlier that morning, and she’d already asked for two water fountain breaks in 40 minutes. When I leaned in, she didn’t look up. “I can’t do it,” she said, quiet enough only I could hear. “I’m too stupid to get the answer right, and then I’ll make the school get a bad grade.”
Mia missed half of 1st grade in 2020, when her grandma, her regular childcare, got long COVID and her family didn’t have reliable internet for remote classes. She’s two grade levels behind in decoding words on paper, but she can spend 20 minutes walking the class through how her grandpa fixes lawnmowers on the weekends. Last month she brought in a rusted carburetor for show and tell, and drew a labeled diagram of how it worked on the whiteboard before I even asked.
That meltdown happened three weeks before our state’s annual ELA assessment, the same test that state and national education leaders have tied to our school’s performance rating, our Title I funding for after-school programs, and even a portion of my annual evaluation. Last fall, federal data showed reading scores across our state had dropped 7% since 2019, and the state board of education’s response was a mandatory 90 minutes of uninterrupted test prep, four days a week, starting eight weeks before test day. No extra funding for reading specialists, no additional social workers to help kids work through years of disrupted routine, just more worksheets and more practice bubble sheets.
I sat through a district training on the mandate last month, where a curriculum coordinator read off a slide deck written in the state capital. When I raised my hand and said half my 8-year-olds can’t sit still for 20 minutes straight, let alone 90, she nodded and said the data shows targeted, uninterrupted practice moves the needle on growth scores. I didn’t push back in the room, but that day after Mia’s meltdown, I closed every test prep booklet on the desks and told the class we were taking an extra 20 minutes of recess. I grabbed the bin of sidewalk chalk I keep in the closet for warm Fridays, and herded everyone outside.
Mia didn’t want to come at first, she was still picking at the holes in her paper, so I walked out beside her. On the blacktop, she and two other kids who also work below grade level in reading drew a honeybee life cycle bigger than all three of them put together. She sounded out “metamorphosis” out loud as she wrote, asked me how to spell the final syllable, and labeled every stage in bright pink chalk. She explained to the other two kids why bees matter for growing strawberries, a fact she’d learned helping her grandpa tend his garden the summer before. When the recess bell rang, she dragged her feet going inside. That afternoon, when we went back to the honeybee passage, she got four out of five questions right, including the two-part inference question she’d been crying over that morning.
I’ve been teaching elementary school for 11 years, and I’ve seen three state superintendents and two federal education secretaries roll out five-year plans to fix “learning loss” in that time. Not one of them has spent a full, unscripted day in my classroom. The only time a national official visited our building, they walked through during a pre-planned 20-minute test prep block, stopped to high-five one kid who got a question right, smiled for photos, and left without asking a single teacher what we actually needed to do our jobs. All they see are aggregate numbers on a spreadsheet. They don’t see the kid who moves in with his aunt halfway through the year while his mom is in treatment, or the kid who doesn’t eat breakfast on weeks the food pantry is running low, or kids like Mia who learn best by drawing and building and talking, not by filling in bubbles for hours at a time.
I can’t ignore the state mandate outright, but I’ve adjusted the 90 minutes to fit the kids I actually have, instead of the imaginary kids on the state’s curriculum slides. I split the block into six 12-minute work chunks, with three-minute movement breaks in between where we dance to a two-minute pop song or walk down the hall to look at the kindergarten art on the bulletin boards. I keep a bin of fidget toys by the door, no questions asked if a kid needs something to occupy their hands while they work. I swap one worksheet a week for a hands-on activity that teaches the exact same standard: when we practiced plant life cycles, we planted bean seeds in cups by the window instead of answering 15 multiple-choice questions about them. My principal looks the other way when my test prep completion numbers come in low, because she sees the difference in the kids too, but she can’t say that out loud to district leadership.
I’ve shared these small adjustments with parents, too, when they email me upset that their kids come home crying about test practice. Mia’s mom, who works two housekeeping jobs downtown, sat across from me at conferences in February and said she feels guilty that she’s too tired after work to force Mia through the 20-page optional practice packets the district sends home. I told her she doesn’t have to do any of them. Instead, I send home low-lift prompts tied to the skills we’re learning: read the street signs on the walk to the bus stop, count out change for the laundromat, read the menu out loud at the diner after church. She texted me last week that Mia read the entire pancake platter description by herself on Sunday, and she had to sit down in the booth for a minute because she couldn’t believe it.
To the state board members and federal education leaders making these rules: I don’t expect you to eliminate annual testing overnight; I know federal rules require it for schools that get Title I money. But I need you to stop tying funding and teacher pay to one day’s test score, which punishes the schools that serve the kids who need the most support. I need you to stop mandating hours of drill practice that makes 8-year-olds think they’re stupid before they even get to middle school. Most of all, I need you to show up without a camera crew or a prepared speech, sit in one of these tiny plastic chairs for a full day, eat the cafeteria pepperoni pizza, sit through a fire drill, and stay for recess. Listen before you write the next set of rules.
As of this week, I haven’t heard back from the district curriculum coordinator about my adjusted test prep schedule. The stack of official practice packets still sits on the counter by my desk, and test day is 18 days away. Mia drew a tiny honeybee in the margin of her practice passage yesterday, and got three out of four inference questions right on her own. She still asks if we can do chalk math at recess once a week, and I tell her we will, as long as we can. I don’t know if anyone making the rules will ever read this. But if you do? Pull up a chair. I keep extra granola bars in my desk, and we’ve got a lot to show you.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » A 3rd Grade Teacher’s Message to State and National Education Leaders: What You’re Missing About Learning Loss