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One of my friends is a teacher in the Dallas ISD schools. She specifically teaches children who do not speak english. Until 3rd grade, these kids have the opportunity (or perhaps it's also a mistake, but that's a debate for another thread and forum) to be taught in spanish only as they slowly learn the english language. She is a native speaker of spanish with a teaching degree. The students that she gets are often from very poor backgrounds. Their parents have a different way of viewing the world and are so busy surviving and making a living that some days in her classroom, she is actually busy doing things like finding a clean pair of pants for a child who came to school in filthy clothing or combing out knots in a little girls' hair, etc, etc. Her stories about her children and their families are both heartbreaking and heartwarming as she talks about kids that start the school year out unable to read even in their own language but then are reading and becoming more responsible and respectful as the year ends. She also works with the parents and helps them to learn about the "American" way of doing school,etc and she has helped many parents problem solve issues unrelated to school to help them become better parents.
This is someone that I greatly, greatly respect and admire! She is one of the unsung heroes...really.
The thing is...the students that she gets in her class make huge leaps and improvements during the year...but if you test them with standardized measures, they still fall woefully behind. Her children aren't measured on the progress that they make from the first day of school to the last...(and what is measured on those tests is really questionable anyway....we can all bitch about how ridiculous the SATs or GREs are as a measure of anything of value, for example).
So in a merit pay system, she will look like a bad teacher if she continues this work.
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