...here:
http://www.edgovblogs.org/duncan/2009/09/town-hall-with... /
Sample post(partial):
I am in my eighth year teaching kindergarten at a school of about 500 children in the small city of ZXZXZX California. I love my job, I love my students and I am brought to tears when I think of the pride I have for my little school that could. In spite of all of the madness around us in education, and the giant hurdles we have to jump over every day with our students, ZXZXZX Elementary is succeeding. We are teaching, learning and caring every day. It is a wonderful place to be.
However, this is not the story for most of America. Schools everywhere are failing. Teachers are exhausted and students are unmotivated and underachieving. I am nothing short of appalled by everything I have read about your suggested changes for education thus far. You seem to have completely overlooked the most obvious necessities in teaching and instead have pushed an agenda that will continue to hurt our students and teachers and push us further down the road of failure. Unless we do something now, public education is going to be something we speak of in past tense when talking to our grandchildren. We will be immersed in a society of private schools and your prized charter schools and those who are already behind will only fall deeper into the cracks.
Least you forget, under current NCLB guidelines, 100% of students, in ALL subgroups must be proficient or advanced in all areas by 2013 or the school is labeled as failing. If one subgroup falls short, we don’t make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and are put into Program Improvement (PI) status. The idea of 100% achievement is virtually impossible, even when language, socio-economic and other hardships are factored in. These are tests based on a bell curve, the tests are designed for some students to fail- 50% should pass, 50% should fail.
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Instead of dumping NCLB and starting fresh with something that actually works for us, you hit below the knees and cripple us further by your efforts to extend our school day and make us compete for funds under the “race to the top” campaign. Neither of these things will make the job easier, they will just raise the bar that much higher. Yet where are the stilts we’ll need to reach it-certainly not anywhere in your policies.
What happened to idea of parents and teachers working together as a family? When did we decide it was acceptable for parents to pass the buck to teachers and have them raise their children for them? Sure the world has changed, many families have two working parents or parents with multiple jobs but that shouldn’t mean that their children should be required to stay after school and work even harder. Most adults are exhausted after an eight hour work day yet you brazenly ask students and teachers to work for twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week? And who will be caring for these children? Surely you don’t expect to staff these programs entirely with single caregivers with no families of their own?
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When our wrists are slapped when the test scores come out we are put in designations of Program Improvement. We are considered failing, even if we made growth, even if we helped every student in our classroom learn. Our students are told they can move to schools that are not in PI, or maybe attend at Charter schools nearby if it’s offered. That’s assuming that the charter school chooses to accept them. When discussing healthcare you state President Obama says he won’t stand aside and let the status quo continue. Yet the two of you not only allow the status quo to continue in education, you reinforce it. Encouraging charter schools will only deepen the achievement gap between students as we create more and more divisions in education. How can we assure an equal education for all when we allow schools to start up with their own set of rules, their own admissions processes and their own standards to follow? There is nothing equal about that. That is private school funded by the public and I can’t support that.
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When you ask our administrators to evaluate our teachers by their students performance I would ask you this- are your jobs evaluated by the quality of life of your constituents? Do we pay you more or less based on the unemployment rate or by the percentage of us who vote? Are you required to make sure that every person in every tax bracket makes more money than they did before and finds fewer tax loopholes before you are considered a quality cabinet member? Do you have to pass an examination that makes you a “Highly Qualified Member of the American Judicial System?” Can we put you in Program Improvement? No? Then how can you possibly ask that of us?
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Where do we need our funds to go? We need direct classroom support in the form of paraprofessional aides. I personally have twenty-five kindergarten students for a full day of instruction every day and I get a paraprofessional aide for seventy five minutes a day. It is not legal in California for a daycare provider to have more than 14 school aged children by herself to supervise while they play, but it is apparently acceptable to ask a teacher to instruct more than double that many.
We need teaching materials. We need to be able to make copies and not have to ask the parents of our students to buy us materials as basic as copy paper. You want us to teach them to read but we have no money left to buy books. You want us to have current research-based curriculum but don’t give us the money to purchase it.
We need clean, safe schools. Currently in my school district if a custodian is sick, the district will not provide a substitute custodian until the fourth day of absence. That means that we will have a dirty classroom for three full days. Three. How often is your office cleaned Mr. Duncan? I’d be willing to bet you’d find it unacceptable for it to be left unclean for half the week and you don’t even have a classroom full of students in there trying to work and learn every day.
We need time to teach, stop tying us up in paperwork. Get rid of assessments whose only purpose is to generate numbers for a computer to eat. Let us do purposeful assessment so it can be the blueprint for our instruction. Give us qualified substitutes who can either teach our classes while we do these assessments or actually do them for us.
We need time to improve our practice. We need to be able to select professional development that is appropriate for us and our actual needs. Give us follow up support after trainings. One day trainings with no follow-up leave us bitter and resentful and serve little purpose in the long run. Make sure trainings are provided for all staff members so we can be on the same page.
Help us get current technology. We are past the overhead era; get us smart boards and ELMO projectors. How about computers that were made sometime after our students were born? How about computer monitors that don’t break from being turned on and off too many times? Is that really so much to ask? Why not give companies that manufacture these products a hefty tax break for providing them to schools?
Make sure our schools are up to code, have working air conditioning and heating and functional furniture and equipment. A school’s appearance is a reflection of it, make sure it looks nice. Give us the funds to maintain our grounds and buildings. Don’t ask us to teach in moldy, rotting portable buildings and then shrug your shoulders when we turn up sick or with cancer a few years later.
Mr. Duncan, I invite you to come and tour around the nation’s schools. Take an inventory of what we are lacking. Read the curriculum. Look at the states’ standards and curriculums. Find out what programs are already in place and are working. Please, please don’t start your tenure in this position in such a harmful way. We’re all in this together- it’s our future at stake.
More at the link. I am very proud of my fellow educators!
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