Watch a Rural School Near You Cannibalize Itself Into Nothingness

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.