Robby Prenkert

After a lifetime of Windows PCs, since September I’ve been using a MacBook Air. Being somewhat familiar with the ecosystem from being an iPhone and iPad user for years made the transition smoother, I suspect.

The MacBook Air is incredible.

Once you go Mac, you’ll never go back.

You might get advice to teach by starting with a stated “outcome” in view and then look for content to serve that end.

My teaching got so much better when I did the opposite: I started with great books and let them work their magic, enchanting the souls of students and leading us in surprising directions.

Indiana has built the data systems that could answer this question. What it has not done is make the answers visible.

On paper, the state is well equipped. Indiana maintains a State Longitudinal Data System that links K–12 records with higher education and workforce data. In principle, it can track students across years and answer precisely the kinds of questions teachers and families care about. What happens to students who struggle in middle school? Where are they five or ten years later? Do early academic failures predict later disengagement, or do many students recover?

Yet despite this infrastructure, there do not appear to be publicly available, Indiana-specific longitudinal studies that follow eighth graders who fail ILEARN forward into adulthood. Instead, what we get are two partial substitutes: snapshot reports of yearly proficiency and broad national research that gestures toward likely outcomes without grounding them in Indiana cohorts.

That gap matters.

What Indiana Actually Tracks

Indiana’s longitudinal system was designed for exactly this purpose. It links student data across grade levels, postsecondary enrollment, and employment so that long-term outcomes can be studied over time. The architecture exists. The data exist. Researchers working under state approval can access them.

Classroom teachers and the general public, however, cannot. The analyses that might tell us how eighth-grade performance connects to graduation, persistence, or later stability largely remain internal or buried in technical research projects. The system is built to see the future. We just are not shown what it sees.

What Is Publicly Reported Instead

Public reporting focuses almost entirely on annual proficiency rates. In recent years, roughly forty percent of Indiana students in grades three through eight have scored proficient in English Language Arts on ILEARN, with seventh and eighth grade among the weakest points. Middle school ELA performance has slipped rather than improved, and state officials regularly name late middle school as a critical area of concern.

What those dashboards do not show is what happens next. There is no public cohort analysis that follows non-proficient eighth graders forward. No simple accounting of how many eventually graduate on time, enroll in college, or disengage altogether. The conversation remains fixed on this year’s scores, not on students’ lives.

What Longitudinal Research Tells Us More Broadly

National and Indiana-based longitudinal research does point in a consistent direction. Patterns such as chronic absenteeism, course failure, and low middle school achievement are strongly associated with later risks. These include high school disengagement, increased dropout rates, and diminished postsecondary participation.

Indiana researchers have used earlier assessment systems and diagnostic tools to study growth over time and the effects of interventions. These studies are valuable, but they still stop short of telling a story that parents or teachers can easily grasp. We do not see five- or ten-year outcome narratives tied to a concrete marker like failing eighth-grade ILEARN.

Why This Question Still Matters

The stated purpose of statewide longitudinal data systems is not merely accountability. It is wisdom. These systems exist so states can judge whether educational decisions actually improve students’ long-term learning, attainment, and well-being.

Yet the public conversation remains trapped in annual percentages. We argue about whether scores went up or down by two points, while the deeper moral question goes unanswered. Where are these children later? Did the system help them grow, or did it quietly lose them?

Teachers ask this question not out of cynicism, but responsibility. We see students struggle at thirteen and fourteen and wonder whether the labels we attach to them will harden into trajectories.

What Can Be Done Now

If someone wants a definitive statewide answer, the most direct path is through researchers already working with Indiana’s longitudinal data. University partners and IES-funded projects are the ones capable of running exactly this analysis, if they choose to ask the question.

At the local level, however, a district-based approach may be more realistic and more humane. Following one or two eighth-grade cohorts through graduation and into early postsecondary life would yield insights that are immediately actionable. It would also restore a sense of proportionality. Not every student who fails a test fails at life. But some patterns are real, and ignoring them helps no one.

Indiana has the data. What it lacks is the will to translate that data into stories that tell us whether our schools are truly serving the children who struggle the most.

And until we ask where those children are years later, we are only pretending to measure what matters.

Loudermilk Ozark X-Files Breaking Bad The Wonder Years

While The Wonder Years may have a clunker episode or two, at its best, there is nothing that comes close. Breaking Bad and Ozark are virtually pitch perfect throughout. The X-Files makes the list for the best of what it was and not what it was at its worst. I should have added the Simpsons, but I so love Loudermilk, that I had to include it. It epitomizes the shift from the postmodern to the metamodern for me—oscillating as it does between irony and sincerity. I just wish they’d renew it for another season.

Stranger Things —all the rage right now—is a good show. It just has too much going on too much of the time. It’s hard to beat its first season, though. I think what they were dealing with just got too big to really believe in, cascading for me into the preposterous so that I have to very overtly suspend disbelief repeatedly to continue enjoying it, which I do. We’ll see how it wraps up, and I’m here for it, but the last two seasons were underwhelming. I just hope Dipshit Derek has some role to play in the final episode.

Advice to students: if you (foolishly) have ChatGPT write your paper for you, at least take the time to run the bibliography through Perplexity and ask it if the sources are real. Chances are, they are not.

On second thought, carry on. You will be caught and you will fail the class, because this is the easiest thing in the world for your teacher to catch.

This article!

AMBS and their ilk in the fringe wing of (North American) “post”-Mennonite churches once again display their cluelessness.

Meanwhile, my neighbor’s children (horse and buggy Mennonites—real Mennonites) rode past on their bicycles this morning on their way to school, stoic as they battled those 40 mph wind gusts. Surely they remain gleefully ignorant of these social media discussions; and for me, the beauty of their diversified, small-scale farm, and the joy they seem to have in caring for it and playing on it is a witness more powerful than almost any sermon I’ve heard. Their faithfulness and fidelity both inspire and put me to shame.

You try, and most things do not work—most especially those things suggested by the teacher’s manual, when you follow the “curriculum map.”

You have modest success trying to teach them basic vocabulary, reading aloud, and working with them through a worksheet of ILearn-type questions. They cannot be trusted for long stretches with their Chromebooks.

When they do not complete your carefully designed, scaffolded writing assignments, you make deals with them to get them to write something, anything, remotely related to the assignment, however late, so you don’t have to feel like a failure when so many of them have failing grades using traditional measures.

Still, too many of them turn in almost nothing, are defiant when you offer them the chance to catch up, or redirect them when they are off task (repeatedly) in class.

It’s discouraging work if you dwell on all that, as opposed to the little miracles that do happen almost daily, that surprise and delight you.

You are beginning to understand what it means to “be joyful, though you have considered the facts.”

1. It should be illegal to own a smart phone until you are 16 years old. You should have to have a license to own one.

2. As a middle school teacher, stuck with a horribly boring ELA curriculum that effectively requires students to use Chromebooks in order for it to function, it is my firm belief that we should return to almost completely analog classrooms if we want to educate our children. Paperback books, pencils, and paper. You don’t need anything else 99% the time.

We are both middle school English teachers.

Wife’s middle school: 650 students, 1 assistant principal, 1 resource officer, 0 security guards, and students are allowed to use the bathroom during passing periods.

My middle school: 400 students, 3 assistant principals, 1 resource officer, 7 full-time security guards, no bathroom use during passing periods.

Also, in one of our classes a student was caught vaping. During class. Guess whose?

Any guess whose school has the better ILearn scores?