school daze
May. 23rd, 2003 02:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sisyphusshruggedI wrote last week about some stress we're having with the kid.
I blame George Bush.
OK, to some extent I blame George Bush because I think George Bush is the seething boil rising to a head on the massive infection that's been raising America's temperature until it doesn't seem as if its brain works any more.
Mostly, though, I blame George Bush because of testing.
Jesse and Jeanne and the Daily Howler have all written about our schools and our teachers and our kids in the last two days, and what they've written is well-thought-out and reasoned and sensible. I figure that gets me off the hook, so I'm freed up just to tell you why I'm pissed.
HM goes to public school. (So did I, and so did Procrustes (cause he's the procrustiest!) and my dad was an elementary school teacher in the NYC school system). We're very lucky - I researched all of the schools that were available to us, and with the exception of one which was far too expensive (12k, and they expected parents, oh OK mothers, to donate their time regularly during the day), our school had the best scores of anything public or private within five miles of us (and we don't keep a car, urbanites that we are).
It was useful, that score, and it's a terrific school.
HM's teacher this year is a disaster.
She seems to be a nice enough woman, a bit querulous, but nice enough, but her class is unruly and they're not learning and she has no control over them at all. It's not completely her fault, though.
This is the part where President Bush comes in.
See, no-one wants to teach fourth grade.
Fourth grade is when they've scheduled the big d0-or-die test that elementary schools are assessed on. Given the importance of the test, and the increasing pressure to link teachers' raises and their jobs to "performance," senior teachers understandably don't want to teach fourth grade - understandably because you can be the greatest teacher in the world and you're still not going to be able to cram four years of cumulative learning into a fourth-grader who hasn't learned what they were supposed to in grades K-3 (particularly if amongst the things they haven't learned are Sitting Attentively in Class and Working and Playing Well with Others).
So, the senior teachers threatened to quit if they were asked to teach fourth grade, including the ones who actually had experience in teaching fourth grade. No-one particularly seems to want two or three either. So, how do we resolve this?
If we want to hold on to our best teachers, we move them to fifth and sixth grade, and that's just what our school did. That's what a lot of schools are doing.
What does that mean? It means a few things.
- It means that the most senior teachers with the most experience are teaching children whose groundwork has already been laid by the least senior teachers
- It means that teachers who are used to teaching students in lower grades are now teaching children in upper grades - children who challenge all their hard-learned assumptions about how classes behave, how they process information, and how they respond.
- It means that children in lower grades are being taught by teachers who don't have experience in teaching lower grades, because they've been bumped out of their upper-grade classes by more senior teachers. (The most experienced teachers didn't traditionally gravitate to the children who were approaching puberty, for obvious reasons).
- It means that teachers who are used to riding herd on pre-pubescent children are carrying their disciplinary methods and expectations into classrooms of seven- and eight-year-olds.
- It means that HM's teacher is a disaster.
I have no idea if she's a good teacher when she's teaching the children she's been working with throughout her career until this year.
I do know that my happy, energetic child is being asked to sit perfectly still all day in the midst of chaos and disorder, and that she and all the rest of the children who don't accomplish that feat (not characteristic of seven-year-olds, to say the least) are told that they aren't good students.
I know that a child who has always gotten As is bringing home Bs, because her teacher assumes that she and her classmates already know how to handle misleading multiple-choice questions and hasn't taught them how.
I know that her uncle and her father and I are teaching her the strategies she needs to cope with the things she's learning, and that we aren't teaching the rest of the kids in her class, and no-one else is, so what we teach her isn't being reinforced by the other kids.
I know that by the time they get to the classrooms with the senior teachers in them, a lot of those kids are going to have it very, very wrong.
I know that after years of being in classes who buy desksful of presents for their teachers, HM has to deal with her feelings of disloyalty when her classmates trash her teacher in the lunchroom - the same children who bought the presents last year.
I know that there's no money for teacher's aides and there's no money for toilet paper (the PTA funds it) but there's money for tests. Lots and lots and lots of tests.
No money to fix the schools. Just enough money to keep current on the level of decay we allow.
My kid isn't going to be left behind, but it's despite our fearless leader and his Great and Good friends at McGraw Hill and the other companies that are getting a windfall from testing.
Go ahead, guess who they gave money to in the last election cycle.
I blame George Bush.
OK, to some extent I blame George Bush because I think George Bush is the seething boil rising to a head on the massive infection that's been raising America's temperature until it doesn't seem as if its brain works any more.
Mostly, though, I blame George Bush because of testing.
Jesse and Jeanne and the Daily Howler have all written about our schools and our teachers and our kids in the last two days, and what they've written is well-thought-out and reasoned and sensible. I figure that gets me off the hook, so I'm freed up just to tell you why I'm pissed.
HM goes to public school. (So did I, and so did Procrustes (cause he's the procrustiest!) and my dad was an elementary school teacher in the NYC school system). We're very lucky - I researched all of the schools that were available to us, and with the exception of one which was far too expensive (12k, and they expected parents, oh OK mothers, to donate their time regularly during the day), our school had the best scores of anything public or private within five miles of us (and we don't keep a car, urbanites that we are).
It was useful, that score, and it's a terrific school.
HM's teacher this year is a disaster.
She seems to be a nice enough woman, a bit querulous, but nice enough, but her class is unruly and they're not learning and she has no control over them at all. It's not completely her fault, though.
This is the part where President Bush comes in.
See, no-one wants to teach fourth grade.
Fourth grade is when they've scheduled the big d0-or-die test that elementary schools are assessed on. Given the importance of the test, and the increasing pressure to link teachers' raises and their jobs to "performance," senior teachers understandably don't want to teach fourth grade - understandably because you can be the greatest teacher in the world and you're still not going to be able to cram four years of cumulative learning into a fourth-grader who hasn't learned what they were supposed to in grades K-3 (particularly if amongst the things they haven't learned are Sitting Attentively in Class and Working and Playing Well with Others).
So, the senior teachers threatened to quit if they were asked to teach fourth grade, including the ones who actually had experience in teaching fourth grade. No-one particularly seems to want two or three either. So, how do we resolve this?
If we want to hold on to our best teachers, we move them to fifth and sixth grade, and that's just what our school did. That's what a lot of schools are doing.
What does that mean? It means a few things.
- It means that the most senior teachers with the most experience are teaching children whose groundwork has already been laid by the least senior teachers
- It means that teachers who are used to teaching students in lower grades are now teaching children in upper grades - children who challenge all their hard-learned assumptions about how classes behave, how they process information, and how they respond.
- It means that children in lower grades are being taught by teachers who don't have experience in teaching lower grades, because they've been bumped out of their upper-grade classes by more senior teachers. (The most experienced teachers didn't traditionally gravitate to the children who were approaching puberty, for obvious reasons).
- It means that teachers who are used to riding herd on pre-pubescent children are carrying their disciplinary methods and expectations into classrooms of seven- and eight-year-olds.
- It means that HM's teacher is a disaster.
I have no idea if she's a good teacher when she's teaching the children she's been working with throughout her career until this year.
I do know that my happy, energetic child is being asked to sit perfectly still all day in the midst of chaos and disorder, and that she and all the rest of the children who don't accomplish that feat (not characteristic of seven-year-olds, to say the least) are told that they aren't good students.
I know that a child who has always gotten As is bringing home Bs, because her teacher assumes that she and her classmates already know how to handle misleading multiple-choice questions and hasn't taught them how.
I know that her uncle and her father and I are teaching her the strategies she needs to cope with the things she's learning, and that we aren't teaching the rest of the kids in her class, and no-one else is, so what we teach her isn't being reinforced by the other kids.
I know that by the time they get to the classrooms with the senior teachers in them, a lot of those kids are going to have it very, very wrong.
I know that after years of being in classes who buy desksful of presents for their teachers, HM has to deal with her feelings of disloyalty when her classmates trash her teacher in the lunchroom - the same children who bought the presents last year.
I know that there's no money for teacher's aides and there's no money for toilet paper (the PTA funds it) but there's money for tests. Lots and lots and lots of tests.
No money to fix the schools. Just enough money to keep current on the level of decay we allow.
My kid isn't going to be left behind, but it's despite our fearless leader and his Great and Good friends at McGraw Hill and the other companies that are getting a windfall from testing.
Go ahead, guess who they gave money to in the last election cycle.
