Adequate Yearly Progress

by Roxanna Elden

  “We can. But you already signed it.”

  “I just want to explain that on the day the outside observer came in, I had a new student who had only been in the class for fifteen minutes. The problem described on this paper was with him.”

  “Well, Mr. Hernandez, I have no control over what an outside observer wrote about your class, but I can assure you that you are responsible for all of your students.” It was clear the assistant principal was enjoying this.

  “Okay, but also, when my inbox was full, during the holiday season, that was because of science fair–related e-mails. Every time they—” The look on Mr. Scamphers’s face told him the discussion was useless, maybe even counterproductive.

  “Okay, well, I tried.” Hernan turned to leave. Clearly, there was no point in bringing up the fridge.

  “Mr. Hernandez, one more thing: I noticed you have an excessive number of plants in your room. Those are a violation of the fire code. You’ll need to take those home by the end of the week.”

  “But I’ve had those for years,” said Hernan.

  “As we’ve discussed, Mr. Hernandez, just because you’ve gotten away with something in the past doesn’t mean it’s allowed. I’ll be putting this directive in an e-mail, so you’ll want to make sure your inbox has space to receive incoming mail.”

  This time, Hernan did not bother to answer. He went back to his classroom and gathered as many plants as he could carry. His apartment was too small to hold them all, so every summer, he moved them to his father’s greenhouse during the last week of school. Now, he supposed, this would be their permanent home.

  It was still light when he parked his Jeep on the grass outside the greenhouse and carried the first pot of bluebonnets inside. He’d find the rows of flowers that hadn’t caught the fungus yet and place the ones from his classroom among them. Eventually, they’d go out as part of some larger order, living out their lives anonymously in the hedges of a hotel or government building.

  But when he turned the corner to the bluebonnet section, he found himself frozen, staring as far down the rows of blue flowers as his eyes could see. The leaves of every one of them were dotted with tiny brown circles.

  CRUNCH TIME

  THE FACULTY MEETING was almost over. Almost. Over. Except it wasn’t, because of the three hands still waving predictably in the air. Two of these hands, shiny-nailed and adorned with multiple rings, belonged to Mrs. Reynolds-Washington and Mrs. Friedman-Katz. The other belonged to Don Comodio.

  Dr. Barrios weighed his options.

  Finally, concealing his dread, he said, “Yes, Mrs. Reynolds-Washington?”

  “It sounded like you were trying to tell us to teach nothing but test-taking skills from now until the TCUP. Is that what you’re telling us?”

  “I don’t think that’s exactly what I said.” Dr. Barrios stirred an amiable laugh into the statement, though of course that was exactly what he had meant. It was one of those things principals didn’t say in so many words, like the fact that seniors were not supposed to receive failing grades. But the topic of the meeting was crunch time, which was the portion of the year when teachers were expected to emphasize test-taking skills, which was a euphemism for teaching almost nothing else.

  Mrs. Reynolds-Washington and Mrs. Friedman-Katz were still staring at him, heads tilted to the left, waiting for his explanation.

  “Just, please, write the Test-Taking Skill of the Day on the board,” said Dr. Barrios, reciting from the most recent Nick Wallabee memo.

  “Is this in addition to the Curriculum Standard of the Day?” said Mrs. Friedman-Katz. She and Mrs. Reynolds-Washington tilted their heads to the right.

  “Yes. Those, too.”

  “And the Research-Based Best Practices?” said Mrs. Reynolds-Washington. Both women folded their arms.

  “And the Winning Strategies? And the shirts?”

  “Yes.” Sorry, he wished he could add, about everything.

  There was a series of tired sighs in the auditorium as teachers absorbed the news.

  “Dr. Barrios! Over here!” Don Comodio’s hand was still in the air, waving wildly.

  Ignoring Mr. Comodio was still an option. It was late. Teachers were already checking their cell phones, folding their meeting agendas, zipping and unzipping their bags. These were the adult equivalents of students snapping binders shut before the bell.

  Dr. Barrios was as eager to leave as any of them. It would be another late night in a week that—in addition to the usual impositions on a principal’s time and blood pressure—included another tense budget meeting. On the other hand, crunch time was no time to seem undemocratic.

  Dr. Barrios sighed. “Yes, Mr. Comodio?”

  “What’s the policy on black pants that are faded so they look gray?”

  “Uh, black pants that look gray?” The question didn’t even make enough sense to dismiss quickly. It had to be clarified, then dismissed.

  “Well, the uniform policy calls for black pants, but one of my students has black pants that are faded so they look gray. My question is, are they still part of the uniform?”

  “Yes, Mr. Comodio. Faded black pants are still part of the uniform.” Dr. Barrios breathed in with the intention of dismissing the meeting.

  “We all need to remember some of our students can’t afford new uniforms every year,” volunteered Mrs. Friedman-Katz. “I could give you several examples right now.”

  Most of the teachers were now in Olympic-runner starting position, ready to race toward the door. Mr. Weber, from his intensely visible spot in the first row, was looking at his watch, ready to evoke Statute III, Item 4 of the teachers’ union contract: Thou shalt not keep instructional staff detained in meetings past the time of 3:40 p.m.

  “We can discuss this some other—” began Dr. Barrios.

  Mrs. Reynolds-Washington broke in. “Anyway, half the kids don’t even obey the uniform policy in the first place.”

  There were murmurs of That’s true and Sure don’t. A few brave teachers crept toward the back doors. They gave their best body-language signals for Picking up the kids, can’t stay, so sorry, but I heard the important part, right? The coaches rose as one from their seats in the back row. Players were on the courts and fields. Heaven forbid there was some injury out there when the coaches were in a meeting.

  “I couldn’t agree more, Mrs. Reynolds-Washington,” said Mr. Comodio. He turned to address the crowd. “It’s only one step ahead of bringing guns to school.”

  The parents on staff were on their phones now, apologizing in hushed voices to babysitters and mothers-in-law and elementary school office personnel.

  “Some of these kids already bring guns to school,” Mrs. Friedman-Katz offered, shaking her head to let the record show she disapproved of this behavior.

  Mr. Comodio nodded solemnly. “And iguanas.”

  This conversation was not going to end organically.

  Dr. Barrios leaned into the microphone again. “Mr. Comodio, we can talk about individual concerns another time. Meeting’s over, everyone. See you tomorrow.”

  There was a burst of enthusiasm as teachers gathered in the aisles, catching up with friends from faraway classrooms before they headed out to prepare for night-school classes, feed kids, walk dogs, grade papers in front of the TV, or do whatever teachers did when they no longer had to be in the Brae Hill Valley High School auditorium.

  The crowd and noise receded until Dr. Barrios stood alone at the lectern, staring out at the rows of empty chairs. What he hadn’t shared during the meeting was that crunch time wasn’t the biggest news. It wasn’t even the biggest crunch. Money was draining fast from the school system, much of it into the hands of Global Schoolhouse School Choice Solutions. Their for-profit and virtual academies were closing the deal with more and more families, promising shortcuts to a diploma and even offering incentives, like free computers. Other groups, too, had been claiming their pieces of the school-funding pie. Families who had always sent their kids to private sch
ools were now getting voucher money to help with tuition, and public-school money was draining into ever more questionable alternatives. Some were not public. Others barely seemed like school: there were religious academies that didn’t allow gay kids, charter schools located inside private golf clubs, glorified homeschool setups whose students didn’t even take the TCUP test.

  Next year, class sizes would balloon more than they already had. Even then, there might not be a big enough budget to keep all the teachers on staff. Principals were supposed to begin assembling paperwork to fire teachers who might receive low Believer Scores. There had been hints that older teachers, with their higher pay, were especially valuable targets.

  Dr. Barrios had not started any such paperwork.

  But the clearest starting point was Mr. Comodio. When the subject of bad teachers came up, teachers who should be fired immediately, it was impossible to keep from picturing Mr. Comodio’s face. In addition to making stupid comments in meetings, he wore ill-fitting, unprofessional clothes and wrote lesson plans only sporadically. His digital grade book remained empty for the first seven weeks of each quarter, at which point it inexplicably filled up with Bs for every student. He had told at least one class of students that Christopher Columbus was the first US president. Amazingly, however, Don Comodio seemed to have no idea what an example of instructional failure he was. There had always been people who turned out to be bad at teaching, but most of them had the decency to quit. They filed out as part of the larger exodus of teachers who’d just had it with some aspect of the job. Not Don Comodio. He stuck around, contributing his opinions as if he were some type of valuable team member, validating anyone who complained that teachers’ unions made it too hard to fire low performers.

  But the true reason there was no paperwork on Don Comodio had nothing to do with the union. It was that Dr. Barrios could not stand the thought of firing anyone, least of all a man in his late sixties who would wander the earth competing for jobs with people in their twenties. Plus, in this one rare case, Dr. Barrios knew a secret that the Reynolds-Washington–Friedman-Katz rumor mill had missed: Don Comodio had cancer.

  Which was why, when Mr. Scamphers had offered to take charge of the paperwork for teachers who would be “nonencouraged to continue employment with the district,” Dr. Barrios had gladly accepted.

  IDENTIFY AUTHOR’S PURPOSE

  SO, FINE. NEX Level hated her. (Did he?) Or he was avoiding her. (Was he?) Or maybe she’d just hurt his pride. She still cringed when she thought of her comment about opening a line of credit. In any case, it was over—Nex hadn’t been in touch since their argument, and she refused to contact him, though there still were times she couldn’t help hoping, when she pulled out her phone between classes, that she might find he’d sent her a message. He probably wasn’t going to, though. Which was fine.

  What she really missed was poetry. Since their first date, she had not gone to a single poetry venue on her own. She hadn’t even written anything new. It was as if poetry itself was Nex Level’s domain, and she dared not enter unless he held open the door. This was the part of the situation that seemed most unfair. (Wasn’t it?)

  The slowness of after-school tutorials invited such mental digressions.

  In front of her, in a circle of desks, sat five low-level readers in various states of disrepair. Other teachers talked about how rewarding it was to work with students individually, but Lena preferred even her rowdiest class to this slow hour at the end of the day, trying to extract the author’s purpose from a passage about Helen Keller. As the group stammered through the story, the effort not to feel depressed exhausted her.

  Two paragraphs into the story, after every student had pronounced the word vaguely wrong, after Lena had explained what to and fro meant, clarified that a honeysuckle was a type of flower, and decided to completely ignore the word languor, she paused to ask a simple recall question. No one could answer it.

  She tried again. “Okay: How did Anne Sullivan teach Helen Keller what a doll was?” There was a forced excitement in her voice that she hated but was powerless to stop.

  “She gave her the doll and traced the letters onto her hand.” Chantel, a massive girl with patches of dry, itchy-looking skin on her hands and wrists, was always the one who provided the merciful answer in the end. She was eager to please and had a sense of focus in spite of her low reading level. In a world that was even half fair, Chantel would have been the type of gifted teenager able to lose herself in books, a late bloomer whose future shined in from beyond the rusty gates of high school and who understood that any book could be a self-help book if you read it right. Instead, here she was, stumbling syllable by syllable along with the others.

  “Very good! So how do you think she showed Helen what a cup was?”

  “A picture?” ventured a girl named Amarylis who was almost definitely pregnant.

  “Remember,” said Lena, “she’s blind.”

  “Oh.”

  “Okay! Let’s start reading again!” Where was this cheerful voice coming from?

  The group mumbled through another paragraph, incomprehensible, uncomprehending. Lena marveled at Anne Sullivan’s patience. How many times must she have traced those letters on Helen Keller’s hand before the meaning sank in? Nothing brought Lena into more direct contact with her own disillusionment than tutoring low-level readers. She had entered teaching expecting students who, with the right question or book recommendation, would demonstrate some untapped well of deep, original thinking. Instead, she’d found that teenagers who had never read a full book were unlikely to share original thoughts. They were much more likely to parrot clichés from social-media celebrities or believe made-up news, or say things like It doesn’t really matter whether you vote—or require bribes to come to tutoring sessions, where they stuttered through passages about Helen Keller.

  Lena cheerfully summarized the paragraph they had just finished. Then she asked the students to close their eyes and trace the word doll into their own hands. “If you were Helen Keller, would you feel happy at learning a new word?”

  “Yes,” said Chantel.

  “If I was blind and deaf, I’d just kill myself,” said Rico.

  Rico’s attendance was even more sporadic in tutorials than it was in class, yet when he showed up, Lena found his presence refreshing. His neck tattoo, which was supposed to make him look tough, contrasted with his Kermit the Frog–like build. He also bit his nails even shorter than Lena bit her own. But it was his sarcasm that made Lena suspect he felt the same way she did, sitting in this circle, reading these passages full of subliminal positive messages. Must every story be a life-affirming testament to the strength of the human spirit? Was it even responsible to insist that every ugly duckling would become a swan, that every little engine could make it over the hill, that all the puzzle pieces needed for a happy ending were already in the box and one only needed the grit to fit them together?

  Lena summoned her theatrical skills to keep the excitement in her eyes. “Have any of you ever learned something that makes everything start to fit together, like a puzzle, and it makes you want to say, aha?”

  More silence. Amarylis tapped her foot, thumping her knee anxiously against the leg of the desk until she caught Lena looking at her.

  Lena tried to keep her own foot from tapping. “Can you imagine the way Helen Keller felt when she finally understood what water was?!”

  “Yes,” said Chantel.

  They finished the passage, moving on to the first question in the author’s-purpose practice packet. What is the most likely reason the author wrote this passage? To persuade? To entertain? To inform? Amarylis was wiggling her foot again, pulling at a string on the threadbare knee of her jeans.

  Lena suppressed a sigh. Even if the students in front of her did pass the TCUP, by some Anne Sullivan–caliber miracle, they would never be the type of readers who thumbed through a newspaper or perused the racks of a bookstore or stayed up all night to finish a novel. Watching one of he
r favorite activities become an instrument of torture made Lena’s soul feel… threadbare.

  Lately, she’d found herself wishing the whole scene were simply someone else’s problem. She imagined being far away, becoming a person who nodded sympathetically to complaints that somebody should do something to fix this whole education thing—the way people did with prostate cancer, or genocide in South Sudan.

  Finally, the tutoring session ended.

  “Great job today, everyone!” Lena lied.

  Threadbare soul. The phrase popped into Lena’s head again—more insistent this time. She jotted it on a corner of the practice packet with its pages of relentless questions about the author’s purpose.

  The truth was, she wasn’t even sure there was such a thing as an “author’s purpose.” There was more than one reason for writing anything, and some of the best authors never revealed their purpose at all. But she would never have tried to explain this. Not with level 1 readers. Not during crunch time.

  When she got home, she took the marked-up packet from her bag and stared at it. Threadbare soul. She imagined Rico biting at his tiny slivers of fingernails, Amarylis tapping her foot, picking at that hole in her jeans.

  Pulling at the strings of my threadbare soul. She turned on some background music and sank into a chair, pen in hand. What rhymed with soul? Trying to meet this artificial goal? Taking its toll? No. These sounded forced. Forget about rhyming, thought Lena. What was this concept she was trying to capture? She bit her thumbnail, a habit that was especially pronounced in times of worry or heartache, but also when ideas were coming to her.

  A lyric from one of the hip-hop chart-toppers she’d suffered through during long-ago parties floated into her head: I got ninety-nine problems, but a bitch ain’t one. Her students had so many problems. Ninety-nine problems, ninety-nine problems… The line kept repeating itself to her like an itch asking to be scratched—like the uneven edge of a fingernail, begging to be bitten into a straight line.