I am honestly still reeling from the illogical path our government has taken to change education over the years. Every bit of evidence says that smaller class sizes, reading to children, having recess, access to health care, and reducing child poverty would have large benefits to our kids. But what do we get instead? Testing and paperwork. Paperwork and testing. Punitive teacher evaluation systems. Field trips to see what rich, successful schools do to see if we can emulate their results. News flash: We can’t.
Several years ago, we went on a trip to Carmel Junior High to see their model. One of our teachers asked about their ESL (English as a Second Language) numbers. Their ESL teacher said, “Two.” Our teacher said, “Two percent?” They responded, “No, two students. They both speak Japanese as their first language.” Every single one of us groaned. Clearly, Carmel Junior High had different issues than we did.
Years after that, I was the school representative in charge of the school improvement plan committee. As the chair of the committee, I was also expected to tour other schools to evaluate their school improvement plans. I think the evaluation body was North Central or something like that. The first and only time I went on such a trip, the teachers there were so stressed out that they were asking me what they should be doing differently like I had all the answers. I told them to relax, because I didn’t have any more insight than they did. I hated being put in that position, so that was the only time I ever agreed to be an evaluator.
Still later, I served on the Superintendent’s Advisory Committee for the Use of Data in the Classroom. I had just read Moneyball, and I was interested in how they would use numbers to improve instruction. What they did was to buy into the Marzano program out of Denver, which meant purchasing books for everyone, training everyone, and creating “data teams” to break down and analyze scores generated from our own testing. Now, I read the book cover to cover. And as a degreed secondary math teacher, I had to take statistics and courses on test validity, so I kind of knew what I was talking about. And the book was just utter nonsense. It expected non-math teachers to know more than I did. From that moment on, whenever I referred to the numbers we were collecting, I called it “data,” including the quotation marks. And when I resigned from the data coordinator position out of frustration for being pulled out of the classroom to take classes in Excel (which I had already done for graduate credit), Two other teachers took my place and just botched the job completely. They were using circle graphs to compare classes of vastly different sizes as if they were identical. Our special education teacher was nearly in tears because her big red circle of four failing kids was the same as our groups of 75-100. The misleading graphs made her look like an abject failure.
Many of my friends will say that it’s all part of an effort to get rid of public education, and I could buy that. But I also hesitate to assign malice where incompetence is more likely.
My final point: I went to a conference on the importance of reading in middle school. I was the lone math teacher from our school, and because I’d written a book, I was chosen to go. And the presenter, every time she tried to include the importance of including reading in math, said, “And this is where you talk about your logarithms.” I couldn’t quite believe what I had just heard, logarithms not being part of our middle school curriculum. But she said it again. And a third time. I wondered what state she was from, and thought just maybe logarithms are a bigger deal there. On the fourth mention, the context was finally revealed. She wasn’t talking about logarithms. She was referring to ALGORITHMS.
So, sometimes it’s not intentional. Sometimes, the harm is done because of simple ignorance.
