Below is the grade distribution for my latest quiz:

It was a simple quiz: 24 questions over four functions (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) with positive and negative single-digit integers. No twists, no curveballs — just stuff like -3 + 2 and -5 x -7 .

For a pre-algebra class, this is review, as it’s what they’ve been doing in the many grades leading up to mine. Furthermore, it’s what we spent the entire week on. I retaught them all the rules they needed to know and we practiced all of them extensively. In fact, every single question on the quiz was one that I’d given them in classwork earlier that week.

And, as you can see, scores are pretty abysmal. 72 kids missed ten or more problems. Only 21 students, less than a full class, missed two or less. And there were only 24 problems.

It’s hard to articulate how low-skilled my kids are sometimes. I mean, people know it in an abstract sense. My school is a failing, low-income public middle school. 97% free and reduced lunch. 100% students of color. 70% English language learners. Single-digit test scores. We’re what people mean when they talk about the achievement gap, we’re what people use for political expediency when they want to talk about educational “reform”, and we’re practically expected to fail, even by the people who don’t want that to happen.

But it’s really hard to get people to really understand what that failure means. The failure on the outside looks like a pre-algebra class having a strong majority of its students lack the pre-requisite skills to be successful. But really, the failure is what it feels like for me and for these kids to work, for an entire week, on skills they’ve already seen and should already know, and still not be able to do them.

And I mean that not in an accusatory sense. I’m not saying that my students’ performance is their fault. It’s actually not about blame at all, as blame doesn’t get anyone anywhere but frustrated. It’s about the idea that there’s some disconnect — a big, powerful, and damning disconnect — between what my students experience and what they learn. And it’s about what that disconnect does to them over time. Nobody likes not understanding something. Nobody likes trying the same thing over and over again and failing at it. Nobody likes feeling stupid or ineffective or powerless.

It’s one of the huge things that makes this job so difficult. The students try and fail and try and fail and try and fail, and, by my grade, so many of them are so sick of failing that many of them often stop trying altogether. It’s hard to watch kids feel like they’re terrible and dumb and worthless. It’s hard to motivate them when they’ve already internalized the idea that the only thing they’re good at is not being good at anything.

And it’s absolutely crushing when all the work you did to break through the barriers and get them excited about learning is for naught when you hand them a quiz with a low grade and their name on it. You watch them retreat back to the safety of denial, or acting out, or shutting down, or checking out, or saying “fuck school, I don’t need this shit” as they angrily walk out the door and rail against the structure that, from their perspective, has fought them and won, time and time and again. That quiz is just another defeat. Another misstep. Another failure. It validates everything, and affirms nothing.

72 kids felt that today. Many will feel it tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the day after that. It’s the kind of thing that tends to hang around and build up over time. It’s the kind of thing that gets the opportunity to present itself in six different periods a day, five days a week. It’s the kind of thing that drives our students to give up on school and, even worse, on themselves.

And I wish I knew how to reverse it — to send the tide back out instead of just dreading how much of the shoreline it’s eating away. I wish I could make my kids feel better. I wish I could teach them in a way that they would understand better. Reformers point to schools like mine and say that clearly the issue is bad instruction, and that might be the case, but nobody has shown me or any of the other people at my school what “good” instruction looks like for our kids. What gets them to bridge that disconnect? What gets them to really get it? What helps them build from behind their walls? We see success happen in limited contexts in our classrooms, with individual kids, but we can’t scale that up systemically. My school and my district and the hundreds just like ours in America have this struggle that nobody seems to be able to solve and, like our kids, we’re feeling the failure. Trying and failing and trying and failing and trying and failing isn’t fun for us either, and it’s no coincidence that the rate of teachers leaving the these schools is often comparable to the rate of students dropping out from them.

Failure is what we feel and what we know. The teachers know it. The kids know it. It tempers our time together and guides our beliefs. There’s not a community in it — a shared bonding that we’re all failing together — but an isolation. We feel singularly inadequate and individually incapable. It’s disheartening, it’s heartbreaking, and it’s tough.

It’s really fucking tough.

And I don’t know what to do about it.