Current Update: For the first
three weeks in an inner city school I averaged 55 hours per week.
This week I am down to 51 hours.
During this
month, I have met several teachers of note. They go above and beyond
the expectations of a typical teacher. These women and men create
posters for every standard they teach and post them in their
classrooms. They study responsive classrooms and other pedagogy and share the things
they learned with one another. For many teaching in this school is their profession,
hobby, evening plans, and subject of study.
Often students
are seen working in small groups during class, after school and
during the teachers' duty free lunch. These folks have
multiple degrees and honors posted in their room and they are well
loved in the community.
Many of them
are rated as a one out of a scale of five under Tennessee's rating system. Ratings are based on test
scores. These ratings do not reflect the levels of professionalism,
ingenuity, and sweat I observe these teachers investing in their
school every day. I have a suspicion the issue could be the test,
not the teachers.
Here is my suggestion for a RFP, I propose we
test whether the teachers are truly at fault for the low test scores in these poverty schools. I propose the
faculty and administrative staff for this school switch buildings and
clientèle to one of the upper level schools for one year. I hypothesize, if the schools were swapped, the test scores for the
teachers at my current school would go through the roof and the
teachers who had high scores would suddenly have low scores.
If I am correct
we would know the issue is not teaching, the churn of teachers is not
improving education; and we may need to step back and re-evaluate how
we evaluate.
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Thank you to the teachers who are fighting this difficult fight. You are all heroes to me.
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