I came to dKos in utter frustration this morning. What follows is a long comment from another diary. I am sorry it is unedited, but I am running right now.
It is 6:20 a.m. here in NY, and I'm a third grade teacher. I have been up since 4 a.m., trying to catch up. On Sunday I worked for 12 hours redesigning lesson plans for the students I am teaching this year. I watched Pres. Obama's interview yesterday. I fear he suffers from the same misconceptions the rest of the country does regarding education. Briefly, because I am on the run this morning, they are:
About Parents: President Obama, please stop telling them all that they have to do is limit T.V. and make sure the homework gets done. This is not all that the roles involve. I am entirely concerned with what is happening in the American family. I have students who come into my class unable to express themselves orally...and am convinced this comes from the simple act of not being spoken to. I am not kidding. Last year, in our small school with just three third grades, we had two children who did not speak at all. Using the language is the basic building block of all literacy, and that starts with phonemic awareness that can only come from human voice interaction in the developmental years.
If parents do not provide a home rich in conversation and literature, students suffer. Families must spend more time interacting, and that includes assigning responsibilities at developmentally appropriate levels, and helping children to follow multi-step directions. People have NO idea how much the lack of what used to be "givens" with regard to our families reflect in our classrooms.
And please, parents, stop developing an "us or them" attitude toward education with students. I have parents who spend most of their time looking for flaws in teachers rather than addressing the real problems their children have with curriculum. When I call and ask you take your student to the pediatrician because he spent the entire day doing nothing but coping with a disability by distracting with bad behavior, don't write me a page-long note telling me I won't allow him to cough in class. You know it's not true before you even write it, and you as a parent, need to get honest with yourself if you have any hope of helping your child. This propensity to engage teachers in battle is ridiculous...Don't make me your target, not someone who spends hours of my day trying to teach your kid to cope with his glaring inability to focus while you ignore the write-ups, the behavior problems, me telling you that the behavior is speaking to a bigger issue...for God's sake, get real and help your kid. And this is JUST one issue I'm having in 25 kids this year. I have another parent who refuses to let her son receive help for auditory discrimination problems, meaning he can't discriminate letter sounds. It is the previous teacher's fault, even though the tests indicate otherwise. These are scientific tests which indicate that he can not distinguish between letters and sounds, not something teachers dreamed up, not something we're judging you with. What the heck people. What's the goal here.
Top-down thinking. Everyone needs to stop looking at students from the end-result down. We have to look at kids from their developmental years up, when all of those neurological synapses are developed. We cancelled Head Start, and we're smashing curriculum down the grade levels. Every time districts/states want education changed they decide to change the tests, the end results. We need a complete review, a clinical review, of what is going on with kids at younger ages who are unable to read.
In my opinion, it is the unreasonable and developmentally inappropriate curriculum that is upon them that is not working. Think back to when you went to school, because it's a lot more complex now in comparison. I have students who couldn't order the letters of the alphabet in my class this year. Is this the fault of previous years' teachers? They are following the proscribed curriculum made up by people who like to make things like this up but don't stick around to measure what happens.
For example, the first grade curriculum includes using quotation marks. Using quotation marks, really, first grade? The third grade curriculum includes studying the economy in China in S.S. Hello, third grade? Just this week I tried to teach capitalization to these poor kids, who are spinning and reeling. I had to go back and teach them the days of the week and months of the year. Why? Not included in the curriculum.
Real interventionists, that are qualified and do their jobs.
I cannot tell you how many reading specialists, math specialists, language specialists my district has on payroll that rarely meet with students and/or are not qualified to do their job. This is also an administrative problem. Several teachers have reported a reading teacher three times before tenure, and still, this teacher is in our school. There are no measurable outcomes for her because she never has her testing done. Why are we carrying these people in education? Answer: Her boyfriend is a friend of another administrator. Nepotism reigns in my district, and no one says a word about it.
Administrators that do their jobs. I am tired of no one questioning the top in education. If the district is not working, who the heck is in charge and why are the teachers, who are already coping with back-breaking work, blamed first?
Clinical approaches to simplifying curriculum, and then administrators who enforce it. President Obama, legislators, everybody, learn these words: Developmentally Appropriate. That doesn't mean some feel-good kids can't do anything approach either. That means we consult with neurologists and top reading and math specialists from around the globe and decide to sift out all of the nonsense and get back to basics with these kids. We did not have problems like this years ago...so why not go back and see what's changed? We need a scientific approach, and education is a science.
Real Curriculum. I look around me and I see people teaching all over the map, despite the proscribed curriculum. If you're a "good teacher" you try, put in the extra hours and try to do the impossible, using the twelve thousand programs the district drops on you with no training, trying to meet the curriculum that doesn't match the district benchmarks that don't match the standardized tests. This overloads students and they end up being jacks of all trades and masters of none. Then there are teachers who ignore it completely citing that it is ridiculous, which it is...but then they end up spending weeks teaching kids things that are non-consequential to their overall education. In the meantime, this weighs out on our kids. That is why they can't multiply basic facts or read in the sixth grade.
And about those standards, state, national and otherwise, I realize people like to pat themselves on the back about them, but I would love it if everyone would please read them. We don't need overarching ideas about teaching children to "read, write and speak." We need to go back to "By the time a child leaves Kindergarten, he or she should have one-to one correspondence in math, be able to decode basic consonant and vowels..." We need SPECIFIC and REASONABLE goals for each grade level. So much time has been spent on aligning the absolutely ambigous and useless standards. It is insanity.
Diagnose and treat learning disabilities. Lately I'm hearing this new RTI stuff and many people are saying that we are diagnosing too many disabilities in certain minority populations. I hate to inform everyone of this, but what do you expect in a country where minority populations are financially and educationally oppressed for years? Get real, and give them the services that the tests prove the kids need. It's not an iffy situation, test the kids when the teacher request it. I don't want to hear that the kid can't be tested because we've reached a damned quota. I am sick over the children that are passed up every year because teachers are tired of having to fight the system.
What is with all of the paperwork? I cannot tell you how much time I spend filling out what used to be the job of secretaries. Even the school nurse sent down her card this year and asked that "the students" fill in their own names. Come on support staff, give a girl a break! We can't and don't have three hours a week to keep up with all of the paper shuffle because half the school, including the administrators, don't know how to use e-mail. Once again, administrators, open your eyes!
Stop saying the teacher is the place to start. I took this job because I wanted to help. Teachers have the intellect and talent to do other things, but they have made gifts of themselves to you. You are right that bad teachers exist, but that is not a condition that is caused by or can be solved by other teachers. Look to nepotism and bad administration on that. It's not the union's fault, hello, teachers have a 4 YEAR probationary period. 4 YEARS to get removed easily if they are not doing their job, and even when tenured, they can still be removed with a hearing. That's all tenure is, stop making it the cure-all catch phrase for what is wrong with education.
I'm in there working my heart out, staying up from 5p.m. to 5 a.m. because I used some of this weekend to take my kid out for his birthday. Are you freaking kidding me that this is my fault and my responsibility? Can we please, please, get a system's thinker to actually look at education?
I'm for hire, as my road to burn-out is paved daily.