This is a story about a tiny district near you. By State measures, an adequate School, unless
you are poor/white, or special needs/white, then not so much. Those kids, who
make up nearly the entire percentage of our student body, are not improving
quickly enough, or by large enough leaps according NYS’s many matrices and
constantly redefined targets.
As a result of course, their teachers are also only
adequate. How else can you possibly explain the lack of significant growth?
Specifically to blame for this are our teachers in the Elementary School. If
the Governor has his way, these teachers will be straight up out of a job in
three years. Good riddance right? That is the goal, identify and eliminate the
weakest links.
There are teachers, who driven by passion and a love of
children, decided to educate and support the whole child. Surprisingly, they
still exist. You know who they are, because you see them crying in their
classrooms, or suffering from frequent migraines. Their creativity, their love
of the young open mind, wasted on prepackaged NYS modules. Black and White
print outs, day after day after day.
Have a child? You’ve seen them. Can’t tell if it’s today’s homework or
homework from 4 months ago? Those are
the ones. Hey, at least they don’t have books anymore, what a bother that would
be.
Then there are the teachers, who were already tired 5 years
ago, who haven’t seen an “evaluation” in 20 years. They have the magical
TENURE. That’s the thing that protects them from the risks of working with your
children, the whims of a School Board or a parent who doesn’t care for them.
Well, good news, no more doing what has always worked in the past! No more
mentoring young teachers and sharing your wisdom….you are now a Common Core
educator. Eh, what’s new, another change
in curriculum? This one has teeth however, they call it rigor. All students
shall learn all math and all ELA all the time, the end. That’s not totally
fair, they do get to read and write and do math about Science and Social Studies….sometimes. For now, they even get a little bit of
art/music and PE.
Of course this is a gross oversimplification, there are
teachers all in between as well, but these two groups are the main players in
our story.
The culmination of all of this rigor and common core and
math and ela and modules?….HIGH STAKES TESTING and Annual Professional
Performance Reviews. So your kids don’t test well, surely your Principal can
still see that you are a good teacher, maybe you just got a room full of duds
this year. No such luck. Under the new
regs, you cannot be rated effective in the classroom if your students do poorly
on State Exams.
Let’s not get distracted with details of how unfair the
tests are written, how biased, how the information is levels beyond what is in
the prescribed modules, not to mention the gazillions of dollars being made by
corporations, that are not our Schools.
So this is crazy, but it turns out, kids living in poverty,
do not perform well on these tests. Seems they have additional stress, families
might not even be spending the prescribed 20 minutes reading a new book to them
nightly, they may work three or four jobs, or no jobs.
Guess what happens to these kids when they get to School,
sometimes hungry, sometimes in the clothes they slept in, they are told to
start chomping down on those black and white modules, page by page, like pacman
eating power pellets. These kids need more time. More time to adjust to School
from day one, more time to know that they are okay in their environment, more
time with adults to process homework and new concepts. They don’t get that
time. Know who else needs more time? Pretty much all kids that don’t learn
fantastically well from black and white handouts. That includes Special
Education kids, but lots of kids who fall in the middle too. Teachers, no
longer get that time and with every passing day, that great teacher who really
sees this entire story, dies a little more inside.
How do you think these kids behave? They spend their days
behind, confused and frustrated. Remember when you went to School and the
teacher would “re-teach”? Yeah, they
don’t have time for that anymore. These kids start to hate School. Start to act
out. They become terror number one destroying a rural School near you….the
DISCIPLINE PROBLEMS.
So, who’s to blame? Teacher must not have very good
classroom management right? Well, teacher doesn’t really get to manage anything
anymore and when they are already teaching in a School where the test scores
aren’t great, it would be suicide to admit to any additional deficits. Old
School teacher with all of their experience, they must have a solution. Turns
out, they never had this sort of problem YEARS AGO (when you could slow down,
differentiate instruction to interests, provide time for kids to PLAY), or at
minimum nobody was coming into their classroom to see the problems.
Clearly, it’s the culture. In this School, it’s okay for
kids to be disrespectful and out of control, to not do their work, to not
achieve. They don’t respect themselves, how can we respect or help them? So it’s
the Superintendent right? Or the Board of Education, somewhere there’s a policy
or a memo or something that can be issued to fix this. Nope, that is not the
case.
In our School District, the buck stops with the Principal.
The guy who is NOT teaching in the classroom, the guy who is on the phone or in
his office with crying parents explaining that they don’t understand why their
kids hate school, he’s writing proposals for more staff, demanding teachers
understand the conditions families in poverty are living under. That’s when he isn’t doing the hours and
hours of mandated observations or paperwork required thereafter.
He isn’t making test scores rise fast enough….why do we need
him again? Sure, administration has experimented with various strategies to get
frustrated kids back into the classroom more quickly, so that they could chomp
down more modules, so that they can do better on the test, so that their
teacher gets to keep their job, but in the end….maybe it’s him. Why is he bringing these distractions, these
PROBLEMS back to the classroom? Why is he suggesting that we add staff, to
address discipline problems? Can’t he suspend a kid all on his own? Send that
first grader to some alternative program? The fact that he isn’t doing these
things clearly shows weakness. He has to go.
In his place? Let’s get a Principal that has taught
Elementary School, somebody who gets us. Someone that will listen to teachers
and somehow….do what? Make the standards go away? Stop evaluating you? Get rid
of State testing? Understand that you cannot have those kids in your
classrooms, when they refuse to fit the mold, someone who will get them gone. Slippery
slope anyone? Which kids exactly do we need to remove from the general
education program? Well, obviously the distractions, the ones that don’t let
the good kids meet their full potential.
So the goal is to round up the “bad” and the “special” and
remove them? Yeah, that’s actually a real plan being discussed, 12-1-1 classes
in a neighboring district. Bus those kids out. Guess how many of THOSE KIDS…are
poor, or have other difficulties at home they are trying to overcome. Imagine
how successful they will be, all grouped together like the island of misfit
toys as early as KINDERGARTEN. Yes, this School, will attempt to weed out the
week at 5 years old and corral them into one location where they are less
distracting to the more capable drones in other rooms.
Who will manage a program like that?? Cleary a Special
Education Advocate could not conscionably recommend pulling kids out of
mainstreamed classes and placing them into more restrictive settings. So who
will do it? How about replacing the role of Special Education Director with a “Special
Programs Director”? WIN!
Let’s make that person a lawyer, so that when we violate the
civil rights of these students, we can go ahead and put an estimated price tag
on potential litigation…although, come on, how are those people going to find,
let alone pay for a lawyer to sue our School?
So what are our neediest kids left with? Nothing really. What do our brightest and
most capable gain? More time to prepare for tests and complete modules, to
hopefully perform well on tests that have no reflection on their capabilities.
Remember how this School is made up mostly of those poor
white and special education white kids? Well, you aren’t going to be able to
remove enough of them to overcome the needs of our families. By removing all
advocates for our Special Needs students, there will be more frustration, more
struggle and more tears. In fact, by removing the stability they have in a well-liked
Principal who gets this story, the further damage
to this School and even this community, is immeasurable. Sure, there may be a
short term sense of vindication, of control by teachers who in all fairness
have lost most of the career they signed up for, but spite is short lived.
There will be more tests, more struggling kids, more scores and more
evaluations.
But don’t worry it won’t go on for long. This misguided District,
is throwing away its best assets, scrapping what works and starting over, or
not. It won’t be long before this sad experiment fails and our School has
completely cannibalized itself into nothingness, absorbed in charity and with
the promise of our low income kids State Aid, by a surviving, neighboring
School District.
