No child left behind: the river

As in classrooms being sold down the river

I have been teaching in Duval County public schools for 31 years. I have been an educator for 35+ years. My original degree is in Recreation. While I have been teaching, my husband and I adopted (at two different times) 2 sets of 3 siblings from the state of Florida. Because of their history they were all classified special needs children (and in some cases they were). I taught through all of the trials and tribulations that anyone would experience raising six children, plus a few additional challenges that were presented, such as a house fire that kept us out of our home for almost 4 months. But I loved teaching and would never consider leaving the profession. I was very selfish about protecting my profession and my involvement in it. I hate being out of the classroom for any reason, personal or professional. I want to be there for the ten months those students (and parents) are counting on me to educate them... My husband has been an incredible support for 35+ years: encouraging me when I have hard days (weeks, years) and picking up the slack at home and with our children when I have been incredibly involved with events at school. I am not a slacker or whiner. I have taught in three public schools in my career and have been recognized as teacher of the year in all three. My husband, children, and I were recognized as a Duval County Adopted Family of the Year. I have earned merit pay annually in Duval County for my students test gains. Since the highly effective ranking has been available in Duval County I have been evaluated as a highly effective teacher. I have always served on committees and teams that are committed to improving my school. I have over a year’s worth of sick days accumulated. I work until 5:00 regularly (tutoring students at least one of those afternoons) and still bring work home. This is all by choice and is not information provided to “blow my own horn”. It is important to know this before I go further, simply so my comments on NCLB are not discounted as those of a slacker or whiner…

The beginning of NCLB brought in a lot of companies that sold additional standards for use beyond what states were requiring. Duval County bought into a program known as NCEE. So we had not one, but two sets of standards to meet with our students. Our students had to know what standard they were working on in the classroom and be able to convey that to visitors in our classrooms. Teachers had to post bulletin boards with student work matching the standards. These boards had to include the assignment, the student task, the teaching learning rubric used for the task, and extensive commentary attached to the students’s work explaining how the standard was met. The board also had to include the time frame the student had to complete the assignment. The work on the bulletin boards was to never to be more then 4 weeks old. We also had to keep portfolios on each student in reading, writing, and math to document the students’ progress in these classes. (Portfolios were not new, but the way they were used, way beyond assessment and planning for a child’s next lessons/remediation, was new.) Teachers had to keep current word walls, and “best practices” became a catch phrase that made teachers want to scream many evenings after a faculty meeting or training. “Best practices” had to be done in a certain way, there was no recognition that many teachers had always implemented best practices because what we were doing didn’t match what our trainers and administrators were told to look for. And on it went, more training, more required documentation, more visits to our classrooms to look for the correct artifacts, question our students, and judge teachers’ effectiveness. And test scores began to stagnate, so more teacher intervention was required. More training, more artifacts required, and more classroom visits… but scores still aren’t improving. So the monitoring intensifies. We now spend hours assessing students and preparing data notebooks as well as all the other requirements that we must meet, even though none of this has been shown to improve instruction. Teachers (me included) are spending hours out of the classroom on school days being trained to be effective teachers while substitutes attempt to teach our lessons. How effective is that?

Teachers do get to write their own professional development plan. Last Wednesday (10/6) we received the forms for this year's Individual Professional Development Plan. We have never seen these particular forms before but were trained by seeing a power point. Questions could not be answered because our trainer had been trained by being shown the same power point and had not been able to get answers to her questions either. But we were told that our principal might ask to see how much our students had improved as a result of our professional development during our annual evaluation conference, but that the information “would not be used” in our evaluation. And the form was due NEXT Wednesday (10/13)…

I teach at an “A” school that has not met our AYP requirement for three years in a row, so the school is identified as a Correct I school and we are monitored by our district and state. We are required to implement RtI (Response to Intervention) for a half hour of every day as a school wide program. So the students at this “A” school no longer have “recess” because they need to be remediated so our school can meet AYP. (After going through the scores of our approximately 800 third, fourth, and fifth graders, it appears that 5 children are the reason we have not made AYP…) Teachers are monitored even more, especially on the all important bulletin board. A faculty that works hard and has been very successful is now having their very job threatened if our students do not meet AYP. We have been told that our evaluations will include our students’ progress on the FAIR test provided and required by the state of Florida. This test had many glitches last year and different ones are appearing this year, but my effectiveness, and that of my colleagues, will be partially based on this erratic assessment tool. Duval County now has learning schedules that tell teachers what to teach on what day. We must be within a two week window on this schedule, regardless of interruptions or our students’ lack of mastery of a concept. Once an hour is lost to a fire drill, a fundraising assembly, etc., it cannot be made up. So it doesn’t take long to be several days behind even if students grasp every concept the first time it is presented. But again, we understand that we could be terminated for failure to adhere to the learning schedule.

So, teachers are no longer given any autonomy in their classroom, must meet many more requirements then in the past, but are totally responsible for their students’ assessment score results and their job security depends on it. And yet, students’ scores are not improving in Florida!