In reference to the new school-grading system, it is important to remember how the demographics of a given class or school can impact teaching and learning. I am a teacher in a public elementary school in Santa Fe, and I have firsthand experience with this issue.

Consider one class I taught in which most of the students were in crisis. Of its 24 students, only four had intact families. The others were separated from their mothers and fathers because of drug abuse, abandonment, mental illness, divorce, prison, abuse or death. One was homeless.

Needless to say, the learning in this class was compromised by the chaos of these students' lives. As a whole, the students rarely did their homework and struggled with staying on task. One student spent the first month of school under her desk crying. Two of the fourth-graders (this was a fourth-fifth combination class) were reading at a kindergarten level. One already had been retained and the other was retained at the end of that school year. Overall, three students had been retained in previous years.

In contrast, the other class, which was a straight fourth grade, was comprised mostly of students who came to school happy and ready to learn. Nineteen out of the 24 students lived with both biological or adoptive parents. They almost always did their homework, paid attention during instruction and applied themselves to their schoolwork. The learning in this class was not compromised.

While it is not the norm to have a class that is filled with children who have heartbreaking life stories, it is not uncommon. Teachers always have been able to manage with one or two students in crisis. However, the entire equation is skewed when a class has six or more students who can barely focus because of the pain in their lives, which is the norm for many of the district's schools.

I have read the report issued by the governor's Effective Teaching Taskforce regarding the proposed changes in evaluating teacher-and-principal effectiveness, some of the briefs that were cited in that report, other academic papers on the value-added model that will be used to determine teacher effectiveness, and a synopsis of the criteria being used for the new school grading system. I remain skeptical that even "cutting-edge value-added methodologies" will be able to account for those classes in which the norm is not one of academic achievement, but one of survival. The low grades that some schools received support my concerns.

Additionally, there were no references to multigrade classes. The difficulty for teachers and students is that because of being held accountable to grade-level standards, teachers must teach two sets of standards simultaneously. This is very difficult. Cuts in education funding have required that class size continues to increase, which makes combination classes more common.

Rather than spend millions of dollars on more standardized tests, the state should help districts reduce class size to the levels that are found at private schools. Current policymakers argue that class size does not affect student learning. If this were true, however, then why do many private schools keep their class size to about 16 students? Why do private schools include their low student-to-teacher ratios and small class sizes in their marketing materials? With smaller classes, our public school teachers would be able to devote more time and energy to each student, which would improve school effectiveness.

Erica Wheeler is a public school teacher. Both classes described herein were at Carlos Gilbert Elementary School.