Hope is Gone for Education in California

Holy shirt! Another five months have slipped by! As the cliché goes, “time flies when you’re a) having fun; b) getting older; or, c) both of the above.”

Retirement has suited me more than I ever expected it would. I thought I would seriously miss teaching – and I do, but, as I indicated in earlier blog postings, most of the grieving had been done months before I retired. Now, however, my ire has been rekindled by the comments pertaining to education made by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in his State of the State address on Wednesday, January 6, 2010. The source from which I obtained the transcript of his address is the website of The Sacramento Bee, which can be found at www.sacbee.com.

The “Bee” quoted Governor Schwarzenegger as saying the following about education in California:

“For too many years, too many children were trapped in low-performing schools. The exit doors may as well have been chained. Now, for the first time, parents – without the principal’s permission – have the right to free their children from these destructive schools. That is great freedom.

“Also in the past, parents had no power to bring about change in their children’s schools but that will now change too. Parents will now have the means to get rid of incompetent principals and take other necessary steps to improve their children’s education.

“And to increase accountability, we finally broke down that firewall so that teachers’ performance can be linked to students’ performance. So those are great, great accomplishments and congratulations to all of you for this great work. (Applause)”

It may sound melodramatic, but my heart is literally breaking for California schools, my colleagues, and the students. I cannot imagine the debacle that will be created when the Governor signs the legislation to bring about these changes. It is totally unfair and short-sighted to link teachers’ performance to students’ performance unless the teachers are given back their power.

As it stands now, teachers have almost no power. Their hands are tied when it comes to discipline. They are being told not only what to teach, but how to teach, when to teach it, and for how long to teach it. If teachers’ jobs and/or pay are going to be determined by their students’ achievement, then teachers must be given the power to determine how, when, and for how long to teach the lessons.

In addition, parents must respect the teacher’s efforts at maintaining control and discipline in the classroom. Without it, not much learning can take place. Too often, parents question the teacher’s judgment as to classroom control. Lastly, if the teacher is going to be held accountable, it would only be fair for the parents to support the teacher’s efforts at helping their children learn by being diligent in making sure their children spend the time at home doing the tasks assigned by the teacher.

As I have said many times in the last several months: I am so glad I retired when I did. My heart goes out to my colleagues.

Now I Feel Retired

I have been retired now for a little over two months. In fact, I did not actually feel retired until August 7, when my colleagues had to return to work. They worked three days, and then the students started. I thought I would be sadder than I am. I thought I would have pangs of regret once the school year started and I was not a part of it. However, that has just not happened.

On Wednesday, August 12, 2009, the students started back to school. I had promised my kindergarten colleagues that I would come that day to help out with the typical first-day chaos. It was nice to be back among the kids. It was nice to see my colleagues. It was not nice to have to contemplate the cruel reality that these precious five-year-olds will have to face.

Gone are the days when a future architect can build a block tower just to delightedly crash it down. Gone are the days when a future graphic designer can experiment with paint and create a whole new color. Gone are the days when a future civil engineer can design a road for the car on the floor. Gone are the days when a future mother can lovingly rock the baby doll while crooning her to sleep. Gone are the days when five-year-olds can spend time just conversing with each other, working out how this getting along thing works.

It breaks my heart to see the soul sucked out of a place that used to be a bubbling spring of juvenile joy and enthusiasm. As a result, I have decided that my volunteering at my former school will be limited to helping with the choir. At least there, the joy still can be heard.

Release and Relinquish

I’ve been officially retired now for almost three weeks. However, it really does not feel like retirement yet; it feels like summer vacation. Of course, that’s what it is to my still-working colleagues. I keep reminding myself that this wonderful schedule of getting up around seven a.m., leisurely preparing for the day, having opportunities to make business calls during the business day (rather than trying to remember to make those calls between 3:30 and 5:00 p.m., or before 8 a.m. if the business is in the eastern US), and actually having sovereignty over my own day will continue for the rest of my life.

But, when my colleagues have to return to work, will I still feel the same bliss? I have given this some real thought. I taught kindergarten in the same school for all of the twenty years it has been in existence. I feel very much as if that kindergarten is “mine.” I was very instrumental in giving it the structure it has now. My kindergarten colleagues who will continue to teach there have every right to re-structure things (within the confines of No Child Left Behind, of course). And I have an obligation to keep my opinions to myself – an accomplishment that my family and close friends know does not come very naturally to me. It is not at all unlike raising one’s children to adulthood, then letting them go out into the world to live their own lives, making their own mistakes, and suffering the consequences of, or reaping the rewards of their own choices. I must release. I must relinquish.

The releasing and relinquishing will be easier because of my plans to keep working with children and literacy. It might be volunteering at the public library. It might be “hanging a shingle” and beginning a tutoring service. It might be volunteering as an “intervention tutor” at the school from which I just retired. It might be a combination of all three things, or something as yet undiscovered. Whatever the future holds, I intend to grab on and enjoy the ride. In the process, I intend to help enrich the lives of children and their families. Bring it on!

Whew!

Well, it’s officially done. I am a retired teacher now. My last work day was Thursday, June 11, 2009, a day without students. The students’ last day was Wednesday, June 10, 2009.

My decision to retire this year was made easier by at least two factors: first, as my previous blogs have indicated, I have become fed up with the way public education is being conducted now. Second, due to the dismal economy, my school district offered a generous Supplemental Employees’ Retirement Program (SERP) as a way to entice us expensive long-term teachers to retire.

As this school year progressed, I became more and more uncomfortable with the things I was expected to be doing in my classroom. A new, one-size-fits-extremely-few teaching strategy was being forced upon us. Not only were we expected to eagerly participate in two-hour planning sessions – for one lesson, with our students being taught by a substitute teacher – but a few days after the planning session, we were observed by no less than two clipboard-holding, note-taking people while we taught the afore-planned lesson. We were being observed to see if we were following all the prescribed steps, in the prescribed manner, without any unnecessary side trips or taking advantage of “teachable moments.”

I feel as if all my individuality and creativity was not only undesired, but downright discouraged. For example, we were required to use some sort of device on which the students’ names could be written, such as craft sticks, key tags, etc. for the purpose of randomly selecting students to respond to questions. We were not allowed to use our best teacher judgment and call on the students whom we felt would need to be brought back from their apparent day dream, or a student whose answer we felt would benefit the responder as well as the class.

Here is where the frustration began: I was progressing through the ever-so-scripted lesson, teaching, asking, pausing, and picking responders. At one point, I had only asked two randomly-selected students and proceeded with the next question whereupon the coach interrupted me to tell me that I must select a third student to respond to the question. It could not be just two, it had to be three. It seems like such a minor thing, but it is an indication of the absurdity of it all.

The idea behind all this is the theory that, with all this somewhat-scripted lesson delivery, the students will make bigger gains in learning, which would raise their scores on the standardized tests, and therefore make the school look good. Students have become nothing more than data generators.

This is just one thread in the fabric of reasons why I can no longer, in good conscience, continue to teach in the public school. Thankfully, I am at an age, and have the years necessary to be able to retire without losing too much.

I may not be a public school teacher anymore, but I fully intend to keep my hand in education by volunteering. I also would be very good at tutoring children who are struggling to become emergent readers. I have so many wonderful, creative ideas! I cannot wait to put some of them to good use.

More Musings on Education

It’s been six months since I last posted to this blog. One of the reasons I have not posted in the past six months is that, as far as my job is concerned, not that much has changed, and almost all of this monotony is due to No Child Left Behind. I actually had hoped that, when Barack Obama took office, being the Democrat that he is, NCLB would be dismantled. No such luck.

I continue to be required to participate in meeting after meeting, all designed around data in some way, and usually scheduled during the teaching day, resulting in a substitute teaching my students. Sigh! As I have often said to my colleague, our students are not children anymore, they are merely data generators.

I am being required to teach in a manner that I strongly feel is not good for children. So, since I am old enough, and have taught long enough, and got my Master’s degree so that I could have my retirement allotment be based on the higher salary, I am retiring in June. The primary reason for my retiring is because I can no longer teach with a clear conscience.

I know that many of my colleagues agree with me. However, for their own reasons, they are choosing not to stand up and collectively say, “We refuse to go along with all this. It’s not good for the children!” There is strength in numbers. If the tenured teachers refused, as a group to do what they all know is not good for the children, the “powers that be” would be disenfranchised.

It is time that public school teachers put their collective foot down and refused to go along with the straight jacket known as No Child Left Behind. It is time for the school districts to refuse funds that come from NCLB. I realize that these words are almost heretical in today’s economy, but the price of participation just so the districts can have more money to spend is just too high! The price is the well being of our children, and the future they will make for us. Now that’s scary!

An Admittendly-Somewhat-Unusual Week in the Life of an Elementary School Teacher

It began on a Monday with an all-day meeting euphemistically called an inservice. Topic? Analyzing test data. Purpose of record? Learn to use the data to become more effective teachers. Real purpose? In my n-t-b-h opinion, to use the data to target specific students to bring them up to a higher level so that their scores can help the school look more effective.

Tuesday: Minimum day for students. Purpose? So teachers can meet in their grade-level groups and -- you guessed it -- analyze more data. Oh, and collaborate so that each classroom is more like the others in the grade level. Heaven forbid any of us think or perform outside the "box."

Wednesday: Morning begins with each kindergarten teacher having to hastily tell a substitute what to do for two hours while we are pulled out of our classrooms to attend yet another meeting. (We had not been informed that our meeting was to take place first thing in the morning.) Purpose? To plan a lesson to be delivered in a style extremely contrived and script-like, and not at all comfortable to me.

Wednesday afternoon: Another impromptu meeting was called for the kindergarten teachers, thankfully after our students left. Purpose: essentially to say, "Never mind!" to the lesson plan we spent two hours away from our students planning.

The burning question I have is this: How do all these meetings help my students learn more? It makes absolutely no sense to me to take me out of my classroom to teach me a new way of teaching which, by the way, is not new at all. It is the same as that which I learned in my credential courses 25 years ago -- only the names have been changed. No one has been able to satisfactorily answer my question of why I must learn a different way to deliver my lessons when I have proven over the years that the majority of children under my tutelage leave to first grade well-prepared to continue their road to being readers. As it has been said numerous times: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

A lot of this nonsense is directly because of No Child Left Behind. The bureaucratic &$#@* hangs on us like a two-ton weight. Instead of helping our students truly learn and be happy, it has made schools become nothing more than data-driven institutions. We are not teaching young people anymore. We're producing data that hopefully will make public education look good.
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In my last blog I was lamenting about the lack of music education in our schools. To go with that, I would like to tell this true story: there is a young woman who is an aide at my school. She is nearing completion of her college requirements for a teaching credential. However, in order to do her student teaching, she needs to pass a state teacher's test -- the CSET, I believe. She has passed all the sections of the test except a section on Art History, PE, and Music. This young woman graduated from a California high school in 2002. California schools have not had art and music as anything more than an elective for about fifteen years. How, I ask you, can this young women be expected to pass this section of the test when she never elected to take music or art? Moreover, why does her student teaching rest on her success at the test when, unless big things change in public education in the very near future, she will not ever be able to teach either art or music?

A Little Music, Please

Since my last blog entry (Was it really only yesterday?!) I conducted a little online research and found an abstract of an article entitled "The Effect of Early Music Training on Child Cognitive Development." from the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, Vol. 20 Issue 4, December 1999. Pages 615-636. The last sentence in the abstract says the following: "This study suggests a significant correspondence between early music instruction and spatial-temporal reasoning abilities." The age range of the children included in the study was four to six years; kindergartners fall right in the middle of that age range.

For the past several years, the term, "research-based," has become almost like a mantra in the educational community. The idea seems to be that teaching using strategies that are not research-based wastes precious educational time. Therefore, we must only use curricula that were published using research-based criteria. That is a very noble and understandable stance. Sadly, however, if I were to use time in my instructional day to directly teach music, and even if I provided proof of the research-based validity of such an endeavor, I would be told in no uncertain terms that I must not "waste" the time on music since that time needs to be spent only on language arts and math. Sigh!

I think back to my own elementary education. While dodging dinosaur legs and avoiding pterodactyl claws on my way to school, I eagerly looked forward to the songs our music teacher would teach us that day. I loved going to school for that fact alone. What an incredible value it was to me! I learned history when we learned folk songs. I learned simple fractions when we were being taught how to read music. I learned how to play what was then called a tonette, which was a simple recorder. And that was just elementary school!

Music kept me attending high school. I cannot imagine how boring and un-motivating school would have been for me had I not had music. In fact, when my academic grades were mediocre, my parents spoke to my academic counselor asking her to take me out of my music class. Thankfully, the counselor discouraged my parents from doing that by telling them that if they took music away from me it would leave nothing for which I would keep attending school.

Music and the arts have been essentially gone from the public school setting for too long. And they wonder why the high school drop-out rate is so high?