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wednesday, nearly there
Mar. 11th, 2009 06:31 amSo, yesterday I administered the reading FCAT. Time will tell (say, around June, when the scores come back) if my kids did well/if the school keeps its "A" rating/I remain out of trouble/teachers get bonuses next year. On that last, if they don't, it'll be seen as my fault. Mine, and the other two tenth grade English teachers. But hey, NO PRESSURE.
President Obama has been doing some really ambitious and, I think, some really great work. But I'm disappointed at his remarks about education yesterday. I think he's missing the point with what's wrong with education in this country, and until he completely scraps No Child Left Behind, anything built on that foundation is going to keel over. I mean, "more accountability"-- wtf is that? We teachers are *already* accountable six ways from Sunday! "More rigor"-- we've added rigor six ways from Sunday, too. Merit pay sounds great on the surface, but deciding on what constitutes merit-- not so easy. And who decides? Administration? Oh, please. As if politics at school already weren't ridiculously arcane.
Lots of really great, creative teachers (and at least one darn good one, yours truly) get burnt out by being forced to become test prep monkeys. For the last three weeks I was NOT ALLOWED, via direct order from my principal, to work on anything else but FCAT drills. Even at our magnet school, it's finally come to this. I had to stop my unit on the Romantic poets right in the middle and do FCAT prep, day in, day out. The kids hated it. I hated it. Hate. What a nice thing to associate school with. You know when tenth graders are begging to read some more Coleridge that the situation has jumped the shark.
Until we ditch the ludicrous idea that a kid's worth, a teacher's worth, a school's worth, or a district's worth revolves around one. standardized. test, education is going to stay broken.
President Obama has been doing some really ambitious and, I think, some really great work. But I'm disappointed at his remarks about education yesterday. I think he's missing the point with what's wrong with education in this country, and until he completely scraps No Child Left Behind, anything built on that foundation is going to keel over. I mean, "more accountability"-- wtf is that? We teachers are *already* accountable six ways from Sunday! "More rigor"-- we've added rigor six ways from Sunday, too. Merit pay sounds great on the surface, but deciding on what constitutes merit-- not so easy. And who decides? Administration? Oh, please. As if politics at school already weren't ridiculously arcane.
Lots of really great, creative teachers (and at least one darn good one, yours truly) get burnt out by being forced to become test prep monkeys. For the last three weeks I was NOT ALLOWED, via direct order from my principal, to work on anything else but FCAT drills. Even at our magnet school, it's finally come to this. I had to stop my unit on the Romantic poets right in the middle and do FCAT prep, day in, day out. The kids hated it. I hated it. Hate. What a nice thing to associate school with. You know when tenth graders are begging to read some more Coleridge that the situation has jumped the shark.
Until we ditch the ludicrous idea that a kid's worth, a teacher's worth, a school's worth, or a district's worth revolves around one. standardized. test, education is going to stay broken.
