The Reality Of Being A Teacher in The 2000's
Paula Reed is a public school teacher who kindly agreed to be my guest blogger on the issues facing teachers today.
I am honored that she took the time to write this, and I can honestly say I learned more about the NCLB Act by reading this, then I have from any news article. For people like April who want to know what it's really like for teachers (and kids), here's an eye-opener from someone who knows first-hand.
Check out her blog Paula Reed to find out more about the daily life of a public school teacher.
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No Child Left Unscathed
by Paula Reed
Here’s the thing that April and so many others don’t understand. Teachers complain about No Child Left Behind because in many cases it has been bad for kids. This isn’t about defending me or my colleagues, it’s about doing our jobs well, and NCLB is a hindrance.
For one thing, NCLB has made the state test the end, rather than the tool (one of many) that it was intended to be. Tests should be one way to assess a school’s achievement, but when it becomes the only way, then the focus becomes preparing kids for the test, not preparing them for life.
I teach in a school with a high academic rating. Our SAT and ACT scores are high, our state test scores are high, and 80% of our students go directly to a four-year college. NCLB requires us to raise our test scores every year, so where we once prepared kids for college, we were forced to focus more on the test. This meant fewer long, in-depth essays and more shallow, short answer writing to better mimic the test. We cut longer literary works and did more excerpts, because those are what appear on the state test. This raised our scores slightly, but not by much, and the effect wasn’t lasting. Seems the kids weren’t interested in being top-notch test-takers.
And why should they be? In Colorado, the test scores do not impact the kids at all. They are not required to pass the test to graduate. Colleges don’t look at the scores. If the kids don’t do their level best, they know that the only ones hurt by it are the schools, and honestly, the kids often don’t care. In Colorado, parents can pull kids out and exempt them from the test. If they do this, the school must average a zero in for that child, as if he or she took it and did not answer a single question correctly. The same thing happens if a student does not show up for any other reason. If a child accidentally goes past the stop page on one test, the ENTIRE test is invalidated and the school must average in a zero. If a child writes beyond the end of one of the lines provided (like having the suffix “ing” hanging slightly over the edge) the score goes down.
There is one modified form of the test for special ed students. It is for students who are profoundly mentally challenged, what we used to call retarded. Every other kid must take the regular test. Teachers are expected to take kids with IQ’s of 75 and get them to score as well as kids with IQ’s of 100. If you know anything about this, that 25 point difference is a profound one in intellectual ability.
This is why schools feel that they must teach to the test, even if it means sacrificing a richer more relevant curriculum. We can see the results of this. George W. Bush, governor of Texas a few years ago, instituted this plan there. Since then, Texas’ ACT and SAT scores have plummeted, their dropout rates have skyrocketed, and professors at Texas state universities report that students from Texas schools are less and less prepared for the rigors of college study.
Another thing schools do to raise test scores is to make themselves inhospitable to the kinds of kids who don’t score well. High schools stop offering things like shop and cooking and replace them with advanced placement classes so that only high-scoring kids will enroll. News flash, the kids who are turned away do not disappear. They end up in our prisons and on our welfare lists.
You’re right April, I will not cooperate with an administration that has no idea what the hell it’s doing and insists on screwing people’s children.
I was at a gathering of women, and one was really pressing me. She said that she didn’t want to hear that school achievement was complex and that the emphasis we’re putting on testing won’t fix all the problems that schools face. Tough luck, lady. It is complex. One size does not fit all. Not all schools have the same problems, and even schools that look like they have the same problems may well have different causes for them. There is no single answer. The testing craze is just plain lazy. I’m sorry, but those interested in education reform are just going to have to start working within the given constraints (that is, dealing with ALL of the barriers to student achievement), being resourceful, and doing the very best job possible to help teachers help children achieve their goals. But no, that cannot work because that would entail being cooperative with educators, and that is something that many of our politicians are simply unwilling to do.
After all, many of our current leaders were elected, in part, by vilifying teachers, and they have a vested interest in a populace that does not think deeply or critically. People who cannot think are more easily placated with clichés and empty promises. You know, things like “don’t change horses in mid-stream” and “I promise that the federal government will do everything in its power to rebuild New Orleans.”
And don’t even get me started on parents, who want rigorous standards as long they mean A’s and B’s on report cards with minimal effort on the home front. Really demand something from kids and watch mommies and daddies rush into the school ready to defend to the death their little babies’ fuzzy-wuzzy little self-esteems.
Since the release of “A Nation at Risk” more and more non-educators have been sticking their fingers into the education pie, and as a direct result, things have only gotten worse. The best teachers, the ones who really know what they’re doing and whom they are doing it for, are burning out and bailing out, leaving no one behind to mentor new teachers who have only been prepared to teach to a rather limited test. Anyone who thinks that NCLB is a panacea has given the matter only the shallowest of thought. It will only place us further and further behind other industrialized nations. If people really want to reform schools, get the heck out of the way and let those of us who know what we’re doing get to work.
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Thank you Paula!
