Years ago, when Kat was in occupational therapy and terribly frustrated, when I was getting frequent calls from the school and we were spending a lot of time in staffings, I thought my entire life for years and years and years would consist of advocating for Kat. Just thinking about the fighting and the maneuvering that her school career would require made me want to lie down, take a nap, and not get up until she graduated high school. As Kat was leaving the elementary school and going over to the middle school though, the elementary principal said something surprising. �The child you�re really going to have to advocate for is not that one,� she said. �That one is going to be just fine on her own before too long. The child you will spend your days advocating for will be your quiet one.�

The concept seemed a bit far-fetched at the time. Day-Hay? I�d have to advocate for Day-Hay? Day-Hay was a quiet child who was almost never in trouble, did the work required, and usually did it well. Yet Mrs. Principal�s words were prophetic. It is Day-Hay I have to advocate for over and over again and it is Day-Hay I now expect to have to advocate for at school for years to come. Day-Hay, my bright, quiet, anxious child who hates to stand out in a crowd, is often under-estimated and often under-performs on standardized tests. She also performs in Kat�s shadow and Kat is an academically tough act to follow.

Advocating for Kat---brash, theatrical, verbally precocious Kat�has turned out to be much easier than I anticipated. A Kat in distress is both obviously distressed and obviously distressing. Everyone knows that they must do something and the only question is what. For now, her high school is quietly keeping her away from the old-fashioned and mean gym teacher who hates poorly coordinated kids because neither the school nor I want to deal with the consequences�and it didn�t take much for them to realize that fact. Kat will not tolerate mean teasing about her coordination difficulties and she will not care that a teacher is doing it. Kat is not afraid of him but the rest of us are afraid of the sparks that would fly.

Advocating for Day-Hay requires making the school realize that a problem exists. Take the issue of her placement for seventh grade, for example. Our middle school tracks kids for both math and language arts. ( Personally, I�m no advocate of tracking for language arts. Any good language arts teacher ought to be able to differentiate instruction if she only has 20 kids in her class. But that�s a discussion for another day.) Until this year�s standardized test scores came out, the school and I assumed that Day-Hay belonged in the top track. It was no accident, for example, that Day-Hay was the only child on winning Battle of the Books teams two years in a row. While her timed writing needs a little work, her untimed writing is generally near the top of the class. She frequently brings home grades of �A� on her writing from a teacher who is not lavish with an �A.�

So imagine my surprise when the school placed her in the middle track for next year. As I opened her standardized tests scores, I began to understand. Day-Hay, anxious, worried Day-Hay, the Day-Hay who is prone to occasional panic attacks and whose fifth grade teacher made her believe her writing was sub-standard, panicked. She blew the writing portion of the test. (She also managed to score in the 98th percentile on the language arts portion�up from the 80th percentile last year and in the 93rd percentile in reading but never mind. That portion of the test apparently did not count enough if one blew the writing portion.)

Publically, the school has always said that standardized tests are only one factor in the decision. The school also says that parents can challenge the placement. So I did. I followed procedure and wrote a letter. The letter acknowledged the low writing score, pointed out her higher scores, pointed out her classroom performance, and talked about her anxiety. I indicated that I wanted her in the top level but that I was willing to listen if the school had a good counter-argument to my position that she belonged there.

The principal called me the next evening. Day-Hay is in the next level. He had no counter-argument. It even turned out that he agreed with me but that he did not want to buck the system openly. He politically needed a parent override. While I was willing to give that political cover, what he had to say disturbed me. I should not have been surprised�and I don�t think I really was�but I was disturbed.

Despite all the talk of considering multiple factors, the criteria for the top class was quite straightforward: reading and language arts scores above the 90th percentile and at least a 4.5 (not Day-Hay�s 3.0) on the writing portion. Day-to-day performance apparently did not count at all, at least not for the first cut. Day-Hay was one of two or three kids �on the bubble.� Bubble kids were those who met most but not all of the criteria. Of the bubble kids, Day-Hay was the closest to making it. For those kids, they had a discussion. For all of them, the decision was made to put them into the top class only if their parents requested it.

Apparently, the discussion about Day-Hay was the most intense. Ultimately, her teacher decided to recommend that they not override the test scores. Why? According to the principal, he believes that, perhaps subconsciously, she was using Kat as the comparison child for what a child in the top level should look like and Kat is a top-flight writer. (The correct comparison, of course, was at least as low as the average writer in the top group.)

The other factor was class size. We cap 7th grade classes at 25 kids. Twenty kids met the criteria for the top level without question. Two or three additional kids were bubble kids. What if we had move-ins?

As a school board member, my job is to advocate for all of the kids, not just my own. Day-Hay is now where she belongs. I cannot advocate one-by-one for the others because boards set policy and should not be involved in the day-to-day running of the school. But we can talk about tracking policies and, if I have my way, we will.

Some day, I�ll put down my battle gear. I�m not expecting it to happen any day soon. About that nap----well, it will just have to wait.

LAST YEAR: Mustard and Iron and Raptors, Oh My

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Copyright 2006 by Ellen