I'm not at all surprised to read that NYC is failing to serve kids with special needs. It's a tough process getting kids evaluated, and it's even tougher to help the kids that I serve. I don't lightly refer kids for services, but I'm sometimes assigned kids who've missed school for years in their first languages, and just lack the connections to function in my classes, let alone others.

It's really amazing to me when I find out a kid missed five years of school. I had a father tell me once that in his country, if you didn't sign the kid up by a certain deadline, you couldn't sign the kid up until the following year. I listened to his story and marveled he had the audacity to tell it. I mean, if I missed signing my kid up for one year, I'd surely not miss the next one. But this guy, according to his own story, had missed five years in a row.

Of course he could've been lying. I've been in countries where I saw children selling Chiclets on the street. The child labor laws in some countries are a little lax. And it's possible the family was so poor they put the kids to work. That's a sad truth, but a lot better than the story he was telling me. It's also possible the guy was just as uneducated as his kid, but the fact was he'd somehow found the wherewithal to get his family over here.

In any case, the end result was a child who had few or no reading and writing skills in his first language. What I do is try to trick kids into loving English, and then once they do that their first language skills kind of move on over. This is usually not a very hard sell, as the entire world around my kids almost revolves around English. Of course there are exceptions. There are kids who really don't want to be here, and there are kids who are frustrated by the demands of writing a new language when they haven't got the benefit of an old one.

Kids like that need special programs. There was a program like that in my school a few years back, but we don't run it anymore. Citywide, I don't know of any initiative for kids who are illiterate, whether born here or elsewhere. Rather, we rely on Common Core stuff which ordinary kids hate, and hope that somehow special needs kids magically overcome not only their own illiteracy, but also learn the well-hidden pleasure of reading a short piece of fiction and dissecting every aspect of it over several months. Since that doesn't work at all for anyone, it's kind of an uphill battle.

As if that weren't enough, when you refer an ELL for special services they need someone who speaks the language to do the interview. Even though you may have dozens of people who speak the language right in your building, and hundreds more walking up and down the streets of your nieghborhood, you need a special DOE-approved person. The DOE has incredibly high standards and every single person they hire is an absolute jewel. Everyone who reads the local papers knows that, because they never have a cross word to say about any DOE employee, ever.

So you sit and wait months for the interview, because there are so few people who speak foreign languages in New York City. Maybe the DOE imports them. Maybe they have to take super-duper special tests. Maybe they have a secret decoder ring approved personally by Carmen Fariña. Maybe they have to sleep with someone very important. It's really tough to say.

Anyway, while you wait months and months, the kids sit in classes that are developmentally inappropriate for them. They watch the kids around them do things they can't. They fail tests in every subject without exception. Surely this makes them feel fabulous about themselves.

Of course, even in a world where absolutely everyone takes the same tests no matter what, it's entirely the fault of their teachers for failing to sufficiently differentiate.

That's basically the argument for replacing NCLB with a new annual testing mandate. You no longer have to use Common Core. You aren't required to judge teachers via junk science. Of course, a whole lot of states, including ours, already do both. And there's nothing in the bill that says we can't continue to do it.

In fact, despite Governor Andy's recent lip service questioning the junk science he championed and enabled, state law would have to be changed in order to sidestep teachers not only being rated at 50% by junk science, but also being observed by complete strangers who may or may not have agendas.

Then you read things like this, which seem to demand prospective teachers meet junk science requirements before becoming certified. The fact that they are not, in fact, teachers of record is neither here nor there. Aside from that, it seems like a bonanza for private academies that want to churn out teachers with less training, fewer qualifications and less education. Surely there must be some way to juke the stats and make a few bucks. It's troubling that such concerns, rather than the education of our children, make their way into bills that merit serious consideration. Perhaps more troubling is that such things seem to merit union support.

Personally, I'm wary of anything that merits the support of so-called Educators for Excellence. This is a group founded by two former teachers who claim to represent current teachers, but take tons of money from the reformies to do so. Their main aims seem to be more work for less pay, having teachers judged on junk science, and making us as close to at-will employees as possible. They sneak into schools with the blessing of ignorant principals and claim anyone who goes to one of their events as a supporter. Why would a group like that support anything that would help us or the kids we serve?

Naturally, faux-teacher group E4E supports the movement toward taking action against the bottom 5% of schools, which has included things like closure, receivership, and placing teachers in the ATR or unemployment line. I see nothing about addressing root causes of student underachievement, which entail neither teacher nor school quality. I'm tired of seeing teachers and schools blamed for our abject failure to address poverty.

Then there's the shirking of responsibility for students with disabilities.  While teachers are regularly told the reason kids fail is our failure to differentiate, it's really tough to do so when all kids face the same assessment no matter what. In fact UFT President Michael Mulgrew told the Delegate Assembly that chronological age ought not to be the sole factor in how students are assessed. Yet in their zeal to avoid root causes by heaping blame on teachers and schools, the writers of this bill appear to have done just that.

Aligning standards for special needs kids with state academic content is tricky. I've watched this unfold with the students I teach, who do not speak English. I went to a curriculum-writing session in which I pointed out to the resident expert that there was no provision for me to teach basic grammar or usage to newcomers. She told me I should use first grade standards for my teenage students. This explicitly indicated the writers of the standards had not considered my kids at all.

The icing on the top of the ESEA cake is the limitation of 1% for alternate assessment. This arbitrary limit might be acceptable if there were no more than 1% of students with disabilities, lack of formal education, or lack of English ability. Sadly that's far from the case, so districts with higher percentages of such students will continue to suffer, and will continue to be scapegoated for the myopia and willful ignorance of this law. Charters will continue to counsel out and toss out such kids as pariahs. They will continue to take no responsibility whatsoever for the huge numbers of students on which their alleged magic fails. Public schools will continue to be scapegoats, and will continue to suffer. In New York, collective bargaining agreement will continue to be abrogated as we blame schools and teachers for government's failures.

Sadly, it looks like allegedly progressive mayor Bill de Blasio will cave to the demands of reformy Merryl Tisch and start closing schools again next year. We need education priorities in these United States that entail helping kids where they are, not one that makes the idiotic presumption that 99% of them are in the same place.

And we need an argument more persuasive than "now with less crap." We are educators and we need to demand rationality.

Or is that to much to ask?

Principal Carol Burris is a local hero, frequently writing in Valerie Strauss blog. Most recently, she wrote about the incipient disaster that is the Common Core. They're raising the bar, making everything rigorous, and making sure my ESL students don't get out of high school until they're senior citizens. This is because what the world needs now is rigor, sweet rigor, according to great minds like David Coleman and Reformy John King.

If these scores were used last year, the New York four-year graduation rate would have dropped from 74 percent to 34 percent. But even that awful rate would not be evenly spread across student groups. A close look  demonstrates just how devastating the imposition of the Common Core scores would be for our minority, disadvantaged and ELL students, as well as our students with disabilities.

Because widespread failure is good for everyone. I mean, sure, kids don't like it, and parents don't like it, and teachers don't like it, but we can't focus on special interests. The important thing is to produce the tests, material to support the tests, and privatized empires like that of Eva Moskowitz so that folks of her ilk can continue to bring home the big bucks.

My attention was caught by another point. Over and over, we hear that we need to make kids "college ready," and evidently those of us educated before the magical Common Core are all a bunch of knuckle-draggers, unable to carry on a discussion about anything whatsoever. And yet, despite all the talk of tests, here's something we already knew:

A study by the National Association of College Admission Counseling (NACAC) looked at the college performance of eight cohorts of students from 33 colleges and universities...The findings were that student college success was better predicted by high school grades than by test scores.

Well waddya know? Our grades, often made up (gasp!) without even a rubric, are better predictors of how kids will do in college than standardized test scores designed by Common Core geniuses. It turns out that you and I, who see and feel the enthusiasm and competence of certain kids, might actually give them credit for it. And it's entirely possible that college professors may note practical intelligence and competence even if a student wrote C instead of D!

Because you know what? While David Coleman may believe no one gives a crap about how kids think of feel, many teachers do. And those of us who wish to elicit worthwhile discussion from kids had better give a crap too. Because who on God's green earth wants to talk to someone who doesn't give a crap how you think or feel? Who wants to analyze a train schedule? Who wants to spend a month analyzing the life out of a short story? Who wants to eat lunch with the likes of David Coleman?

Not me.

Empathy is a great quality. Understanding and getting along with others is a great quality too. They will help you get through school and to have a more productive life. I see kids who are good at this and I believe they will excel at whatever they choose to do. I give them higher grades for making my class a better place to be, and you'd better believe their employers, if they're smarter than David Coleman, will pay them better and fight to keep them.

Because we look at people, not just test scores. A student who scores a hundred on every assessment and never interacts with anyone is a student who needs better prep for college, and for life. We, as teachers, know many things David Coleman doesn't know. We, as teachers, have to help and guide those kids even if it won't help our value-added ratings.

That's why it behooves us to stand with our students, and with their parents, to fight this corporate outrage known as the Common Core. It doesn't just need to be slowed down. Like every other fruitless core, it needs to be tossed in the compost heap.