Saturday, March 30, 2013
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Our Tax Dollars at Work
Coming out of the last two weeks of SBA testing, I am physically and emotionally exhausted. I did not administer any tests to students. My administration does not allow teachers who actually teach the students to administer the test because they fear we might help students cheat. Instead, I spent one week babysitting. Yes, babysitting. The following week, I had so many students absent that on several occasions, I only had one and two students present for classes.
About two weeks prior to the testing, my administration met with our department and instructed us to come up with a curriculum for the freshmen and senior students who would not be testing. This was a little bizarre, considering I do not teach any of these students. Essentially, we were instructed to come up with busy work for these students who I had never encountered before. As one can imagine, this plan was a complete disaster.
I wish I would have recorded that week of school. Parents truly need to know what a waste of time and resources that week actually is for the students who are not testing, at least at my school. I know there are more efficient ways of conducting the days of testing. At least that's what I've heard from teachers at other districts.
I am now behind in my lesson plans, all due to testing. Students will now have a unit severely shortened--a valuable unit of learning--all due to testing. And I am left with so many unanswered questions... when and how did this become the norm? Why has this testing become so significantly important that it overrules actual learning in the classroom? How much is all of this really costing us? Who is really profiting from this? Is the testing really helping the students? And I cannot help but wonder, what happened to the days when students passed a class... passed their grade levels 9-12 that it meant they were proficient to graduate high school.
About two weeks prior to the testing, my administration met with our department and instructed us to come up with a curriculum for the freshmen and senior students who would not be testing. This was a little bizarre, considering I do not teach any of these students. Essentially, we were instructed to come up with busy work for these students who I had never encountered before. As one can imagine, this plan was a complete disaster.
I wish I would have recorded that week of school. Parents truly need to know what a waste of time and resources that week actually is for the students who are not testing, at least at my school. I know there are more efficient ways of conducting the days of testing. At least that's what I've heard from teachers at other districts.
I am now behind in my lesson plans, all due to testing. Students will now have a unit severely shortened--a valuable unit of learning--all due to testing. And I am left with so many unanswered questions... when and how did this become the norm? Why has this testing become so significantly important that it overrules actual learning in the classroom? How much is all of this really costing us? Who is really profiting from this? Is the testing really helping the students? And I cannot help but wonder, what happened to the days when students passed a class... passed their grade levels 9-12 that it meant they were proficient to graduate high school.
Friday, March 15, 2013
Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships
I have come to realize that I work in a school setting that
places process over people. Our district has recently tried to implement a
quality improvement system that was originally designed for a business model,
specifically the medical field. Many organizations tried using it in the 1990s,
and they chucked it after realizing it left out the personal side of the
equation.
The main issue I personally have with the method is that it’s
founded on statistics. All decisions for adjustment in curriculum are driven by
data—that’s it. There’s absolutely no room for the personal, the student.
My head is spinning that my administration is taking such a
huge step back in time in that we are actually paying big money to regress. Our
faculty estimated that the district has paid upwards of $70,000 to the
consultant group that has “taught” us the strategy. I use the term teach very
loosely here. After almost ten sessions, we are no further along than the first
meeting. Yet, we are now out a very large sum of money that could have gone toward purchasing needed textbooks that align with the new common core.
Somewhere along the way in my many discussions with very
intelligent people, I found out about the triangle of success for the modern
school. Imagine a triangle that’s divided into three sections. At the top of
the triangle is rigor. We need rigor and high expectations in our classroom—all
of our classrooms. Low expectations will always produce low results. In the
middle section of the triangle is relevance. We must use subjects in our
lessons that are relevant and real to the students. If they can’t connect with
it on a personal level, then very few of them will invest. Lastly, the bottom
(and the largest portion of the divided triangle) is comprised of
relationships. Personal relationships with students are the most fundamental
ingredient to their success in education. Research shows that students who are
most successful in school have important, personal relationships with at least one
of their teachers or faculty.
At the beginning of every school year, teachers and faculty
should divide up the student body, and every single faculty member is
responsible for intentionally developing a personal relationship with these
students. Every single student must have a faculty member he or she can count
on to talk to about issues or difficulties. Without this safety net—this ethic
of care—data doesn’t mean anything.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
To Confirm or Not Confirm; New Mexico's Hanna Skandera
For a little more than a week, the New Mexico Senate Rules Committee in Albuquerque has been debating the confirmation of Hanna Skandera as New Mexico's Secretary of Education. Many committee members, teachers (current and retired), and administrators have concerns about Skandera's lack of experience in education, as well as her recent overruling of New Mexico's Public Education Department's stance on the use of public funds for private schools.
Although Skandera has years of experience working with educational consulting agencies, she has never worked in a classroom--or a public school. She has never stood in front of a class to teach any subject, and she has never served as an administrator for a school, which severely limits her practical understanding.
This past year, Skandera proposed New Mexico to transition to a new grading system for schools and standards for teacher evaluations, topics that have many educators perplexed by the vagaries and lack of efficacy. If we require our administrators to have at least three years' experience in the classroom as a teacher, why wouldn't we want the same for our secretary of education? Leadership 101 from my military days taught me that the best leaders are those who know what it's like to be in the trenches.
What's most concerning to me is Skandera's relationship with private consulting firms, at least one of which dabbles in private school educational management. I cannot help but wonder if her conflict of interest overrode her self-proclaimed concern to "do what's best for the students" when she decided to tell private charter schools that she personally endorsed their receiving public funds, effectively negating the opposing ruling given by the PED, which had already ruled against private charter schools being publicly funded.
Organizing and running our public schools under "best-practices business models" does not work. It will never work, because it is not a money-making business. It's not a production-based factory, and students are not products. Here's hoping our Senate Rules Committee stands firm for ethics.
Although Skandera has years of experience working with educational consulting agencies, she has never worked in a classroom--or a public school. She has never stood in front of a class to teach any subject, and she has never served as an administrator for a school, which severely limits her practical understanding.
This past year, Skandera proposed New Mexico to transition to a new grading system for schools and standards for teacher evaluations, topics that have many educators perplexed by the vagaries and lack of efficacy. If we require our administrators to have at least three years' experience in the classroom as a teacher, why wouldn't we want the same for our secretary of education? Leadership 101 from my military days taught me that the best leaders are those who know what it's like to be in the trenches.
What's most concerning to me is Skandera's relationship with private consulting firms, at least one of which dabbles in private school educational management. I cannot help but wonder if her conflict of interest overrode her self-proclaimed concern to "do what's best for the students" when she decided to tell private charter schools that she personally endorsed their receiving public funds, effectively negating the opposing ruling given by the PED, which had already ruled against private charter schools being publicly funded.
Organizing and running our public schools under "best-practices business models" does not work. It will never work, because it is not a money-making business. It's not a production-based factory, and students are not products. Here's hoping our Senate Rules Committee stands firm for ethics.
Saturday, March 2, 2013
The System Is Killing Us
Our State Based Assessment (SBA) is coming up soon--yet another week will be stolen from the classroom. Administration is already hovering over us, asking us to teach to the test in order to "prepare our students." A few days ago I was asked, "What are you doing to prepare your students for the SBA." I was glad other teachers jumped in to answer the question, because my answer would have caused problems. My natural response to a question like that is something along the lines... I thought what we do all year long prepares them for assessments.
Needless to say, I will not be implementing drill-and-kill vocabulary. I do not plan to hand out past SBA tests for students to practice taking them in class. Nor will I give any lengthy lessons on the so-called ACE/RACE short answer response technique. Instead, I have devoted my class instructional time to exactly what my unit/lesson plans have indicated (which we turn in to administration): reading comprehension, critical thinking, contextual vocabulary, writing to enhance critical thinking, research, presenting research in a formal manner, and much, much more.
In addition to the implication that I should teach to the test, I have been told that someone else (who does not teach my students any subject) will be administering the SBA to them. Boom <-- that's my mind being blown. Furthermore, one of the people who will be administering the SBA to my students, sadly, has revealed themselves (improper pronoun use here is intentional to avoid gender revelation) to have their own, ugly agenda.
Never mind the argument that Hanna "Montana" Skandera (New Mexico's acting education secretary and who has never been in the classroom) is currently implementing an evaluation system that relies on MY students' standardized test scores to evaluate my teaching effectiveness (I'll save this gem for another blog). And never mind that neither the current SBA nor our textbooks match up with the newly implemented Common Core Standards. What really infuriates me is that an overwhelming amount of research demonstrates that students perform better on these types of tests when they are administered by their own teacher. So, why in the world is my administration refusing to set my students up for success?!
At first, I thought maybe my administration was just uninformed, didn't know the research out there showing that students feel more comfortable with a teacher who knows them and has a trusted relationship with them. Then I discover, other teachers have been fighting this issue for the last few years. The administration is purposefully organizing testing this way! At this point, I am at a complete loss for words.
Needless to say, I will not be implementing drill-and-kill vocabulary. I do not plan to hand out past SBA tests for students to practice taking them in class. Nor will I give any lengthy lessons on the so-called ACE/RACE short answer response technique. Instead, I have devoted my class instructional time to exactly what my unit/lesson plans have indicated (which we turn in to administration): reading comprehension, critical thinking, contextual vocabulary, writing to enhance critical thinking, research, presenting research in a formal manner, and much, much more.
In addition to the implication that I should teach to the test, I have been told that someone else (who does not teach my students any subject) will be administering the SBA to them. Boom <-- that's my mind being blown. Furthermore, one of the people who will be administering the SBA to my students, sadly, has revealed themselves (improper pronoun use here is intentional to avoid gender revelation) to have their own, ugly agenda.
Never mind the argument that Hanna "Montana" Skandera (New Mexico's acting education secretary and who has never been in the classroom) is currently implementing an evaluation system that relies on MY students' standardized test scores to evaluate my teaching effectiveness (I'll save this gem for another blog). And never mind that neither the current SBA nor our textbooks match up with the newly implemented Common Core Standards. What really infuriates me is that an overwhelming amount of research demonstrates that students perform better on these types of tests when they are administered by their own teacher. So, why in the world is my administration refusing to set my students up for success?!
At first, I thought maybe my administration was just uninformed, didn't know the research out there showing that students feel more comfortable with a teacher who knows them and has a trusted relationship with them. Then I discover, other teachers have been fighting this issue for the last few years. The administration is purposefully organizing testing this way! At this point, I am at a complete loss for words.
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