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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsKindergarten teacher: My job is now about tests and data — not children. I quit.
Kindergarten teacher: My job is now about tests and data not children. I quit.I have watched as my job requirements swung away from a focus on the children, their individual learning styles, emotional needs, and their individual families, interests and strengths to a focus on testing, assessing, and scoring young children, thereby ramping up the academic demands and pressures on them.
Each year, I have been required to spend more time attending classes and workshops to learn about new academic demands that smack of 1st and 2nd grade, instead of kindergarten and PreK. I have needed to schedule and attend more and more meetings about increasingly extreme behaviors and emotional needs of children in my classroom; I recognize many of these behaviors as children shouting out to the adults in their world, I cant do this! Look at me! Know me! Help me! See me! I have changed my practice over the years to allow the necessary time and focus for all the demands coming down from above. Each year there are more. Each year I have had less and less time to teach the children I love in the way I know bestand in the way child development experts recommend. I reached the place last year where I began to feel I was part of a broken system that was causing damage to those very children I was there to serve.
I was trying to survive in a community of colleagues who were struggling to do the same: to adapt and survive, to continue to hold onto what we could, and to affirm what we believe to be quality teaching for an early childhood classroom. I began to feel a deep sense of loss of integrity. I felt my spirit, my passion as a teacher, slip away. I felt anger rise inside me. I felt I needed to survive by looking elsewhere and leaving the community I love so dearly. I did not feel I was leaving my job. I felt then and feel now that my job left me.
the rest:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/23/kindergarten-teacher-my-job-is-now-about-tests-and-data-not-children-i-quit/?Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost
Aristus
(66,467 posts)Everything has to come with a cost/benefit analysis. Every action has to have a quantifiable, testable outcome. Children now have to start preparing to be a profitable cog in the corporate machine from the earliest possible age.
What a crime...
AverageJoe90
(10,745 posts)just with a few changes, that's all.
d_legendary1
(2,586 posts)produce illiterate students who then have to either take college remedial classes or take jobs at McDeath and Broker King to make ends meet. I read a few articles a while back where some manufacturers (what little we have left) are having a hard time finding good candidates because the education system here suck big black donkey balls.
reformist2
(9,841 posts)In more ways than one!
progressoid
(49,999 posts)xocet
(3,873 posts)mountain grammy
(26,655 posts)Jerry442
(1,265 posts)What's the plan if they don't do well? Flog them?
tecelote
(5,122 posts)questionseverything
(9,661 posts)the big difference is the "tests" used to be used to point out weaknesses the parents could work on at home over the summer to give the child a head start for next year, no biggie and no pressure
now these failing "test" grades make the school fail which puts them on the road to being defunded and replaced with a charter school that does not accept every1
no child left behind started this crap and race to the top accelerates it
Ilsa
(61,698 posts)Insist on this, and what are their degrees in? The Kinders aren't going to do calculus, no matter how hard the teacher tries to make them learn it!
Lifelong Protester
(8,421 posts)cabal. At least in WI.
clg311
(119 posts)Are ruining public education.
Ka hrnt
(308 posts)...is not smart enough to be in education. Or even first or More bogus sophistry (BS, if you will) pouring down from federal and state "reformers" (read: privatizers). Stupid, stupid, stupid. As someone else mentioned, there's something horribly wrong at our colleges of education and/or the corporate money has completely taken over federal and state policy.
Other than that, I have just one pet peeve:
There is no scientific evidence that learning styles exist; at the very least, the most popular theory is definitely wrong. (See Daniel Willingham's research among others.... )
LuckyLib
(6,820 posts)i.e., "I was in school and had/have kids in schools" empowers folks to speak out as experts. They have no clue. The system has gone haywire with a business accountability model, and staff are overwhelmed. It's why many folks (teachers and parents) resort to private schools (if they can afford it) -- where they don't have to salute to every idiotic corporate trend that comes down the pike. I was a teacher many years ago -- could not survive today's classrooms. I salute those educators who do wonderful work each day.
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)The first family in crime doesn't need any praise. Especially from "Democrats".
peace, kp
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)I can't remember where it was. Some seminar on education reform. Enough to make you sick.
zeemike
(18,998 posts)The Bush brand is being rehabilitated...and the Democrats must do it.
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)Fuck Democrats that seek to rehabilitate the Bush crime family name.
FiveGoodMen
(20,018 posts)tecelote
(5,122 posts)I will trust the local school to self-regulate well before I will trust big business.
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)You live in a beautiful state, friend.
Cryptoad
(8,254 posts)but I am in the process of turning this http://artcorpssd.com/ArtLessons/ into a nonprofit,
peace, kp
i really wondering if the teacher in Q was a union teacher.
KamaAina
(78,249 posts)Possibly the smartest city in the U.S., if not the world??!! Cambridge has fallen victim to the ed deformers??!!
1monster
(11,012 posts)I mentioned that I never saw the students getting lesson plans that allowed hands on training any more. One school used to have an archeological dig on the school grounds The students had to excavate artifacts that had been buried in previous years, using archeological procedures, cleaning, and cataloging their finds.
This activity was only for the elite students (high I.Q.s and high performance) and I thought it was a shame that the lower level students didn't get to have hands on activities like this too. I was told that, due to testing standards, there simply was not enough time for this kind of activity for students who needed more time to learn.
Now, even the gifted students don't get to do hands on activities because teachers have been given time lines to cover materials and they have to be spot on that time line. The students are given high stakes tests every nine weeks to make sure they are on the mark... woe betide the teacher who has taken a a few days more to make the learning more interesting.
Those every nine weeks tests are over and above the state mandated test that counts for everything from school grades to graduating.
Smarmie Doofus
(14,498 posts)DamnYankeeInHouston
(1,365 posts)The emotional demands from children and adults, the incredibly long hours, tedious paperwork, lack of materials and stress from ever increasing demands has always been there, but teachers used to be valued and appreciated and praised and thanked. Now teachers are under attack from predator administrators serving at the pleasure of corporate vultures. Public schools have become a brutal and inhumane place for children as well as for teachers. School is not healthy for children and other living things.
narnian60
(3,510 posts)Well said.
CK_John
(10,005 posts)To be replaced by new graduates for a 3 yr job at minimum pay, no perks, no pension plans, just a resume builder and hit the road.
charmay
(525 posts)shell shocked when discussing all of the crap that they have been forced to do this year. One was actually spoken to by administration because the kids were having too much fun in his room. Unbelievable!