This is my response to the mass firing of an entire teaching staff of an inner-city school in Rhode Island this week. More info about it can be found at here.
Please try to hear the sarcasm in my voice as you read the last parts of this.
From a teachers perspective here is how I understand the situation. Your state accepts the no child left behind program. Which in a nutshell is: Fed gov. gives your state exorbitant amounts of money to help with education as long as your state follows specific curriculum and agrees that your teachers will be assessed by the ... See Moresuccess of their students on standardized tests. If a teachers students tests scores fall under a certain percentage, the teacher doesn't get a raise, or gets fired. If your schools standardized test scores fall under a certain percentage for a certain number of years, your school qualifies as a failing school and what happened in Rhode Island could be happening to your school.
I think that most people would whole-heatedly agree that there should be accountability in our educational system, especially when there is "a lot" of public money involved. The problem that we teachers have with this system is that TEACHERS are being evaluated by STUDENT performance. See the problem? How would you feel if lets say you were the best darn code-debugger in the whole department but your raises and even keeping your job depended not on how well you debugged and tested things, but by how many units of Microsoft office were sold that quarter? I know it's not the best example, but it kind of fits.
I think that most people would whole-heatedly agree that there should be accountability in our educational system, especially when there is "a lot" of public money involved. The problem that we teachers have with this system is that TEACHERS are being evaluated by STUDENT performance. See the problem? How would you feel if lets say you were the best darn code-debugger in the whole department but your raises and even keeping your job depended not on how well you debugged and tested things, but by how many units of Microsoft office were sold that quarter? I know it's not the best example, but it kind of fits.
Why in the heck would I ever want to teach in an inner city or a lower economic school that has consistent low test scores? I could work my butt off and be the worlds greatest teacher ever, but if my students don't get a good grade on one lousily-written standardized test, I'm screwed. Would I risk it? No way. I'm gonna find the richest district I can find and then slack off, be a crappy teacher and watch my students get great scores and reap the benefit.
There-in lies the problem with no child left behind. Assessing the quality of our teachers and schools by a standardized test given to the students that cover 3 or 4 subjects is not the right in my humble opinion. Yes we need accountability. I don't think standardized tests are the answer. How do we asses band directors, football coaches, art teachers, etc? Clearly the answer is get rid of everything but math, science, grammar and turn our youth into the largest group of non-creative, boring robot zombies in the history of the world... or just send all those extra-curricular teachers to Rhode Island to get fired. That might just work too.
*Side note: Utah does not recieve any money from NCLB. That's right, not a single penny of the almost 1 BILLION dollars alloted to us. They just gave it away to other states. In Utah we fire our teachers becuase we don't have money to pay them and not because their students get bad test scores.
For more info about it I would suggest going to wikipedia. There is actually a ton of pretty decent information.
**Another side note: I find it quite amusing that Utah was the #1 anti-NCLB state. Why is this funny? We are the 2nd most republican state in the country and NCLB was Bush's first major bill he pushed through as a newly elected president. Anyone else see the humor?
