Edchat Transcript: Do We Believe Educators Should Further Education Reform? No Need For Another Expensive and Ineffective Program

Edchat Transcript: Do We Believe Educators Should Further Education Reform?

No Need For Another Expensive and Ineffective Program

Here's a radical idea:  How about letting teachers teach by cutting down on the amount of redundant paperwork they need to fill out (e.g. CSAP forms, attendance roll sheets, etc.) Generally speaking, teachers complete these time-consuming tasks sometime during their work day, and the only way they can complete it is by cutting back on the preparation time for instruction or instruction altogether.  This isn't because they want to be bad teachers; they are left with little choice.  Additionally, we could let teachers teach according to each student's needs and not the political needs in the form of instruction wholly based on how to take standardized tests.

The current system incentivizes such narrow-minded approach that everyone falls prey to the pressure, and it is easier and more economically convenient, at least in the short term, to do what's asked, even when it makes little sense, than to ask questions about an irrational practice. For the time they have before and after school is already used to organize classroom and more paperwork.

Before I came into teaching I had the same attitude toward teachers that Betty Ray accurately described in her blog.  But after a few months on the job, my perception of this profession has evolved dramatically.  I now respect people who are aware of the challenges and still choose this profession, because it is hard, exhausting, underpaid, and underappreciated.  I am part of what's considered a failing school, and after observing what goes on in my school and what goes on in another suburban school, I could find a major difference in the way teachers prepare their instruction and/or deliver it.  I think we are looking in the wrong place when we blame the schools, the teachers, the administrators, for failing grades. 

The truth is, and not many people are willing to admit it, the problem is bigger than the school, is bigger than the community.  It is a social responsibility that should be shared among all citizens living in the US. Schools only reflect the disparities that exist in our society and that may be a result that's taken generations in the making. Unfortunately, schools are the first official institutions where these disparities become quantifiable and somehow legitimized vis a vis student test scores.  But they are not the make or break of the students. 

The schools serve only as 'coaches' at best, and 'facilitators' at worst for education to take place.  Schools, and for that matter, teachers, are limited as to what they can make students do inside the school and powerless to what they can make students do outside.  Yet, they are the scapegoats of our collective failure, direct failure from the parents' lack of input, the acute segregation along economic lines, and the shortsightedness of political influence that has exacerbated the problem, and not helped to solve it.