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...here: http://www.edgovblogs.org/duncan/2009/09/town-hall-with-teachers-join-the-discussion/Sample post: Dear Mr. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan,
I am in my eighth year teaching kindergarten at a school of about 500 children in the small city of Woodland California. I love my job, I love my students and I am brought to tears when I think of the pride I have for my little school that could. In spite of all of the madness around us in education, and the giant hurdles we have to jump over every day with our students, C.E. Dingle Elementary is succeeding. We are teaching, learning and caring every day. It is a wonderful place to be.
However, this is not the story for most of America. Schools everywhere are failing. Teachers are exhausted and students are unmotivated and underachieving. I am nothing short of appalled by everything I have read about your suggested changes for education thus far. You seem to have completely overlooked the most obvious necessities in teaching and instead have pushed an agenda that will continue to hurt our students and teachers and push us further down the road of failure. Unless we do something now, public education is going to be something we speak of in past tense when talking to our grandchildren. We will be immersed in a society of private schools and your prized charter schools and those who are already behind will only fall deeper into the cracks.
Least you forget, under current NCLB guidelines, 100% of students, in ALL subgroups must be proficient or advanced in all areas by 2013 or the school is labeled as failing. If one subgroup falls short, we don’t make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and are put into Program Improvement (PI) status. The idea of 100% achievement is virtually impossible, even when language, socio-economic and other hardships are factored in. These are tests based on a bell curve, the tests are designed for some students to fail- 50% should pass, 50% should fail.
Consider this- if all students can meet the standard, then isn’t the standard not set high enough? How can we expect all subgroups to achieve 100% proficiency when the very fact that we have divided them into subgroups verifies that we understand them to be different, yet we are asking for them all to achieve at the same rate. In addition, may I point out that not every test takes the same test? Every state has their own set of standards and a different exam. Only 20% of the test, which is given six to eight weeks BEFORE the school year ends, is standardized for the entire nation. We are not comparing apples to apples here.
Instead of dumping NCLB and starting fresh with something that actually works for us, you hit below the knees and cripple us further by your efforts to extend our school day and make us compete for funds under the “race to the top” campaign. Neither of these things will make the job easier, they will just raise the bar that much higher. Yet where are the stilts we’ll need to reach it-certainly not anywhere in your policies.
What happened to idea of parents and teachers working together as a family? When did we decide it was acceptable for parents to pass the buck to teachers and have them raise their children for them? Sure the world has changed, many families have two working parents or parents with multiple jobs but that shouldn’t mean that their children should be required to stay after school and work even harder. Most adults are exhausted after an eight hour work day yet you brazenly ask students and teachers to work for twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week? And who will be caring for these children? Surely you don’t expect to staff these programs entirely with single caregivers with no families of their own?
Please remember that we need a break. Part of the reason we have continued to have such a long summer vacation is not because of the agrarian calendar from which it developed but simply because we all need a break! Can you even imagine the enormous teacher burnout rate?
We are not robots, we are not numbers on a page, we are not a factory full of equipment, we are not a business- we are PEOPLE. We are people with our own families to care for, our own health to mind and our own needs to meet. If we are asked to spend four hours extra a day caring for other people’s children, who will care for our own? Shall we put them in daycare so we can babysit someone else’s child at our own expense? You suggest using programs such as YMCA to staff these programs- do you intend to shut those businesses down with the decrease in revenue they receive from paying parents while you use taxpayer’s money to fund an afterschool program at the school?
When comparing us to other countries, there are several factors worth noting and studying. First note that when looking at the duration of instruction, we are not behind when comparing hours. Take a look at actual instructional time before you start throwing around additional days and hours like candy in a parade. Again I ask you to compare apples to apples. Look at the standards that are the same and compare the actual instructional time. Then come back with some numbers to share with us.
Let’s make sure we take a look at the quality of the education happening in these other countries. How many languages are they dealing with and how are they dealing with that? What services do they provide for free for their students? Consider the student to teacher ratio. Look at the teacher adjunct duty requirements. Take a good hard look at the depth of instruction that is found, rather than the breadth we see in the United States. We ask a great deal of our students- to read and write at five, no exceptions, to do algebra in second grade when they don’t even know their doubles facts because the curriculum moved so fast they never had time to master it. With seven to eight months to teach nine months worth of instruction and the incredible weight we have resting upon us to go, go, go we cruise through the curriculum at a breathtaking pace, and I don’t mean that in a good way.
Instead of covering what students need to know and need help with, we rush along, following our little pacing guides set forth by school districts as a result of NCLB designations of Program Improvement whether or not it is in the best interest of our students. We spend hours after school tutoring those who are behind, have time left to do little for those who are above and pray that the grade level kids can keep up with the rapid pace set by administrators who have been gone so long from the classroom that they’ve forgotten why they got into education in the first place. We spend all kinds of money on after school interventions, when if we just put the money into the classroom in the first place, we would likely not need them at all!
When our wrists are slapped when the test scores come out we are put in designations of Program Improvement. We are considered failing, even if we made growth, even if we helped every student in our classroom learn. Our students are told they can move to schools that are not in PI, or maybe attend at Charter schools nearby if it’s offered. That’s assuming that the charter school chooses to accept them. When discussing healthcare you state President Obama says he won’t stand aside and let the status quo continue. Yet the two of you not only allow the status quo to continue in education, you reinforce it. Encouraging charter schools will only deepen the achievement gap between students as we create more and more divisions in education. How can we assure an equal education for all when we allow schools to start up with their own set of rules, their own admissions processes and their own standards to follow? There is nothing equal about that. That is private school funded by the public and I can’t support that. There is little convincing evidence that charter schools are any better schools than a regular public schools nor that they produce a more educated or higher qualified student.
When you ask our administrators to evaluate our teachers by their students performance I would ask you this- are your jobs evaluated by the quality of life of your constituents? Do we pay you more or less based on the unemployment rate or by the percentage of us who vote? Are you required to make sure that every person in every tax bracket makes more money than they did before and finds fewer tax loopholes before you are considered a quality cabinet member? Do you have to pass an examination that makes you a “Highly Qualified Member of the American Judicial System?” Can we put you in Program Improvement? No? Then how can you possibly ask that of us?
So what am I asking of you then, Mr. Secretary? I’m asking that you read this and hear me. Hear us. Get the message. We need help. We need support. We need money. We need you not to make us fight for it, but to give it freely and with appropriate designations. Don’t allow it to go to administration. A shocking amount of funds get hung up in the state, county and local district offices. Many administrative secretaries for the multitude of administrators take home a bigger salary than most of the teachers in their district. In WJUSD alone we have four, yes, four administrators for a district student population of just 10,450. Teachers are asked to work more and more efficiently but the administrative level seems to get additional support at every turn. We are so top heavy that it’s amazing we can even stand up.
We are asked to work more efficiently, while at the same time the administrators are allowed to continue to divide into smaller and smaller parts at a higher and higher cost to the district. When a school is labeled failing we create another layer of bureaucracy with another set of eyes watching and monitoring and additional funds are taken from the classroom. This has yet to prove to actually increase scores or help schools! Stop the wasteful spending. Cut the fat out! Put the money where it counts. Our district actually hired two people from a PI district to come and get us out of our own PI status. Explain to me how that makes sense?
Where do we need our funds to go? We need direct classroom support in the form of paraprofessional aides. I personally have twenty-five kindergarten students for a full day of instruction every day and I get a paraprofessional aide for seventy five minutes a day. It is not legal in California for a daycare provider to have more than 14 school aged children by herself to supervise while they play, but it is apparently acceptable to ask a teacher to instruct more than double that many.
We need teaching materials. We need to be able to make copies and not have to ask the parents of our students to buy us materials as basic as copy paper. You want us to teach them to read but we have no money left to buy books. You want us to have current research-based curriculum but don’t give us the money to purchase it.
We need clean, safe schools. Currently in my school district if a custodian is sick, the district will not provide a substitute custodian until the fourth day of absence. That means that we will have a dirty classroom for three full days. Three. How often is your office cleaned Mr. Duncan? I’d be willing to bet you’d find it unacceptable for it to be left unclean for half the week and you don’t even have a classroom full of students in there trying to work and learn every day.
We need time to teach, stop tying us up in paperwork. Get rid of assessments whose only purpose is to generate numbers for a computer to eat. Let us do purposeful assessment so it can be the blueprint for our instruction. Give us qualified substitutes who can either teach our classes while we do these assessments or actually do them for us.
We need time to improve our practice. We need to be able to select professional development that is appropriate for us and our actual needs. Give us follow up support after trainings. One day trainings with no follow-up leave us bitter and resentful and serve little purpose in the long run. Make sure trainings are provided for all staff members so we can be on the same page.
Help us get current technology. We are past the overhead era; get us smart boards and ELMO projectors. How about computers that were made sometime after our students were born? How about computer monitors that don’t break from being turned on and off too many times? Is that really so much to ask? Why not give companies that manufacture these products a hefty tax break for providing them to schools?
Make sure our schools are up to code, have working air conditioning and heating and functional furniture and equipment. A school’s appearance is a reflection of it, make sure it looks nice. Give us the funds to maintain our grounds and buildings. Don’t ask us to teach in moldy, rotting portable buildings and then shrug your shoulders when we turn up sick or with cancer a few years later.
Mr. Duncan, I invite you to come and tour around the nation’s schools. Take an inventory of what we are lacking. Read the curriculum. Look at the states’ standards and curriculums. Find out what programs are already in place and are working. Please, please don’t start your tenure in this position in such a harmful way. We’re all in this together- it’s our future at stake.Sorry mods, if over the limit...but excerpts don't do it justice. |
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