I should mention that the free downloads of No Child Left Alive, which are mentioned in the post, are no longer available, but the book is, both in paperback and e-book versions.
At my hearing, C. J. Huff said No Child Left Alive had nothing to say about education.
Many of the things that happen in the fictitious Franklin Heights Unified School District in No Child Left Alive are the things that have tortured teachers in the Joplin R-8 School District.
-Upper-level administrators blaming teachers when students fail and forcing them to give grades the students do not deserve
-Students being kept in school despite serious behavioral problems with no protection given to teachers or to other students.
-All kinds of new programs being implemented, many of which contradict each other.
-A culture of meetings, meetings, and more meetings
-Pulling teachers out of class over and over again to attend meetings and leaving students with substitute teachers, with many of the best not wanting to be here because of the disciplinary problems.
-Crimes going unreported so they won't make the school's statistics look bad.
-Much, much more
Again, read this. I wrote it two days after the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School. It should be obvious to anyone that it was not written for eighth graders. See if you can believe that seven supposedly intelligent people could buy into administration's nonsense...and remember that three seats on the board are up for election this year.
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No phrase irritates me as much as "data-driven education."
As someone who has dealt with educational data for the past 35 years, first as a reporter and now as a classroom teacher, I have learned that statistics should never be taken at face value.
From my discussions with teachers across the United States, I have seen many of my thoughts confirmed and many of them in a way that scares me, especially when it comes to statistics on violence in our schools.
I have heard one story after another of how school administrators, seeking to climb up the organizational ladder, report declining statistics on violent incidents and referrals, often by categorizing them differently, or by adding a separate layer of reports that are then not included in those that go to the state or federal governments.
I also hear from teachers who suffer the consequences when their building administrators, often following edicts from top administration, send those who commit classroom disruptions back into the same classrooms without any type of meaningful consequence. This has led to an increasing feeling of isolation among teachers, and in fact, has led many of them to leave for other, less stressful, better-paying jobs.
That lack of discipline has led, despite "statistics" from many school districts showing that the number of such "incidents" is on the decline, to an increased amount of bullying, which always leaves the door open to the sort of violent incident that happened April 20, 1999, at Columbine, and has been repeated since then across the country.
Education, in a frenzy brought on, in part, by No Child Left Behind, perhaps just as much as a reaction to the so-called "reformers" who are looking for ways to profit from public education or want to destroy it so they do not have to pay taxes (since they are sending their own children to private schools, anyway), has jumped on the bandwagon of one fad after another, often with sketchy, sometimes non-existent statistical backing.
And let's face it, it is hard for school boards and administrators to make names for themselves, unless they are trying the latest "innovative" methods of teaching, even as they discard those two years later for the next round of can't miss, cutting edge, state-of-the-art advancements.
All of these factors increasingly leave classroom teachers in a struggle to separate the wheat from the chaff among these educational ideas, and being forced often to make "innovations" work even when common sense says they won't.
Teachers' struggles to cope with all of these outside forces are the focus of my novel, No Child Left Alive. I had initially planned a Christmas promotion for the e-book this weekend, but I do not intend to try to make a profit from a book with that title and with the tagline "If the shooter doesn't get them, the system will," in the wake of Friday's shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut,
At the same time, I firmly believe that the issues brought up in the book are worthy of discussion, so I am offering free downloads of No Child Left Alive today (Sunday, December 16) and tomorrow.
Buzzwords like "data-driven education" and "best practices" are often the enemy of real education and rely on statistics and personal ambition that have nothing to do with the reality our nation's teachers see in the classroom every day.
Please feel free to download the book today or tomorrow and let's start a discussion.
2 comments:
The majority of your issues that you call "torture for the teachers" is such a joke. "We had to go to a lot of meetings even if we didn't want to. They forced us to do team building exercises. They expected us - the teachers for God's sake - to have to deal with the problem kids. They forced the poor substitute teachers to come in and do the unthinkable - substitute teach. They had the gall to not only set policies for the teachers (aka the employees) but actually follow the policies. The higher-ups would try to supervise what the teachers were doing and then evaluate us."
That is what most people recognize as being an employee. We all have bosses, supervisors and managers that set the rules and expect us to follow them. When my boss wants to call meetings every morning I roll my eyes and grumble to other employees that are on my level about how this wastes time and are fruitless. But I go and I sit respectfully and I understand I don't get to decide these things.
Teachers should be trained on how to handle the problem students. A good teacher knows how to maintain control. And for the occasional student who is never going to follow the rules they go to ISD or to the school for troubled kids.
Finally substitutes have been abused by students since the day the first substitute teacher walked into a classroom. Substitute teachers only make money when they are substituting so if you think they don't like the meetings called by the administration you are delusional.
"Education, in a frenzy brought on, in part, by No Child Left Behind, perhaps just as much as a reaction to the so-called "reformers" who are looking for ways to profit from public education or want to destroy it so they do not have to pay taxes (since they are sending their own children to private schools, anyway), has jumped on the bandwagon of one fad after another, often with sketchy, sometimes non-existent statistical backing."
Who exactly are the reformers? How are they trying to destroy public education? Is there anywhere in Missouri that you can opt out of paying the portion of taxes that goes to public education if you send your kids to private schools? Are you saying one group of reformers wants to profit from public education while another group of reformers wants to destroy it? Or are they trying to achieve both goals simultaneously? And is it a requirement to be a "reformer" that you send your child to a private school?
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