Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Ranting about education

The county I live in is amazing, in the worst possible way. They have spent millions of dollars to teach teachers how to write lesson plans. They said that lesson plans are the reason why this county has recieved a D or F grade in education. As a teacher, I know lesson plans are important. I also understand that lesson plans are not the reason why kids do poorly on tests. The leader of the school board was the highest paid in the state. If her schools were not performing, then why was she getting so much money? Teachers suffer if their kids do not do well. Shouldn't the same rules apply?

The FCAT is the test used to measure if a student is doing well in school The problem is not the test, it is the weight that the test carries. A child can be held back if they fail this one test, even if they pass all their classes. The greatest irony comes from the title of the rule that helped develope the FCAT: The no child left behind act.

My hat goes off to all the teachers out there. Its an uphill battle that seems to have no good ending. Trust me, you teachers who are actually teaching, not reading the paper, playing on facebook, or tweeting about how bad your classes are, will be rewarded one day.

Thats all the time I have for today. Thank you for reading.

3 comments:

  1. yeah man we live in an interesting time in education..i love it how educational buzzwords are thrown around like they are actual educational policy..sigh, we do what we can

    james

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  2. I could rant all day long too...

    But one thing that struck me is that kids pass their class, yet fail the FCAT. Those really aren't all that related. You see, in our county (the same one you want about), teachers are given negative evaluations (on at least 1 category) if they have students with Ds and Fs.

    So, really, grades are meaningless too.

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  3. I'm also a teacher in that same county, and here I am over the summer planning for next year. The problem I'm facing is I don't know what the curriculum will be next year.

    Let me start by explaining what happened this past school year. The county administrators changed the "curriculum maps," which tell us whar we're supposed to cover, four times during the last school year. That was four times that I was told during the year to change what I was teaching. Then, after all that, my principal decided to ignore the county curriculum maps and go with a curriculum from another county...except we were only going to use the parts of that county's curriculum that matched a chart of the state standards that appear most frequently on the FCAT.

    After all that, the principal has said she's not sure what we'll do next year. It all depends on how FCAT scores come out. If they go up thsi year, we'll do more of her own stuff. If scores don't go up, she has no idea what we'll do.

    That's life as a teacher in this county.

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