Topic: What concerns you about the future of Education?
Or What would you like to change about Public Education?
What concerns me most, yes even more that low salaries, is the ‘Big Brother is Watching You” threat that has come about with the extreme emphasis on testing. High Stakes Testing. The importance of the results of “The Test” has created sets of standards that dictate that we teach to the test. I don’t care how that state it, we teach to the test. The items on the test are taken from those standards and we have banks of sample and release items to use with classes to be sure that students master those items and those objectives.
So where does that lead? It leads, I fear greatly, into a world of sameness. Lois Lowry looked at it in The Giver, Gathering Blue, and The Messenger. Many educators will say, “Oh, that can’t happen,” but it can. About three or four years ago, the state decided that the back to school staff development days would be standardized throughout. Yes, the whole state. They brought teachers from every county to Charleston, from every discipline. Then , they gave them notebooks—scripted power point presentations. To insure uniformity of information, those teachers were instructed to follow the script—word for word. It happened, I was there. Or, shall I say, I was here. Within counties they had lead teachers present for the core subjects, but related arts, electives, etc., had to report to RESA presentations. The Vo-Tech people from all of RESA II filled the Cabell County VO-Tech Center to be indoctrinated with whatever policy that the State Dept. mandated should be covered at that time. We also have developed curriculum maps that say what objective should be taught and when during the course of the year so if a student moves from one school to the next they won’t miss concepts. Yeah, like they are all going to be there all 180 days of instruction. What a dream world. Then, we’re developeing Essential Questions that are standardized and we’re developing 21st century lessons plans that are standardized. They tell us to use these as tools, that the text is a resource, not the only source, but if you’ve got a map telling you when to teach something and the same book as everyone else and then these wonderful, hint of sarcasm, lessons plans—what are the chances that this too will become standardized. I fear that abefore too long they will have a notebook, a script and a power point presentation for all the content standards in the core subjects. What happened to the individual giftedness of those awesomely wonderful TEACHERS? It can’t become so standardized that we lose the sight of the individuality of each teacher and each student. I fight the system. I do things my own way. If I was in the core subject classrooms, I would fight even harder, I think. We have too many law makers and politicians whose views of education are limited to their own twelve years of public education and too many State Dept Administation who haven’t sat in a classroom in ten or even twenty years making decisions. Ultimately teaching kids is not like selling blueberries!
