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Fixing the school system!
While schools struggle with budget demands and decreasing resources from the state, new challenges arise daily.
How to best serve students while maintaining a good working relationship with the MEA is one of the challenges facing school boards, escalating health care costs and building maintenance are others. Through most of the process, the students seems to take a backseat in many districts.
How to maintain the swimming pool quality, how to pay to resurface the football field or add new tennis courts were priorities during the late nineties and at the turn of the century. How to evaluate teacher performance has been a hot topic lately without a solution. How do we put students first is a priority.
The main ingredient necessary to a healthy quality education, along with good teachers, in my opinion, is parental involvement and disipline. These areas have been made more difficult with the current economy and have been battered and abused by a legal system that is hell bent on political correctness and is a casualty of our legal system.
While some disricts are looking at a state takeover, most of it can be avoided with better parental involvement. Parental involvement is an area that is taken for granted and is so important, but no one seems to be attempting to get parents more involved.
I know that many are struggling to make ends meet and that some parents have two or three jobs but a parent being involved in a child's education is one of the most critical elements in a child's development. It doesn't take much time, mostly an interest in their daily activities. If you can, drop by the school unannounced and stop by and watch the teacher's activities for 5 or 10 minutes. Parents who are able to attend field trips make a lasting impression on young minds. I am not suggesting doing their homework, I am suggesting listening to your student and become active in their education.
How to evaluate teacher performance is another area in which there never seems to be a solution. I would like to offer one idea for consideration, taken from the JD Powers playbook.
Why not have the students and their parents evaluate teachers? Much like JD Powers does for car companies, hotels, travel companies, etc..., send out an anonymous survey to students and families and get their opinions and have them score the teaching staff. Have the people with the most to lose or gain evaluate the teachers.
The currently used MEAP tests are under suspicion as to their validity. Some teachers teach for the test and waste a couple of weeks of a students time instead of teaching their curriculum.
Instead of MEAP test or in addition to the tests, why not ask the students and their parents?
How to best serve students while maintaining a good working relationship with the MEA is one of the challenges facing school boards, escalating health care costs and building maintenance are others. Through most of the process, the students seems to take a backseat in many districts.
How to maintain the swimming pool quality, how to pay to resurface the football field or add new tennis courts were priorities during the late nineties and at the turn of the century. How to evaluate teacher performance has been a hot topic lately without a solution. How do we put students first is a priority.
The main ingredient necessary to a healthy quality education, along with good teachers, in my opinion, is parental involvement and disipline. These areas have been made more difficult with the current economy and have been battered and abused by a legal system that is hell bent on political correctness and is a casualty of our legal system.
While some disricts are looking at a state takeover, most of it can be avoided with better parental involvement. Parental involvement is an area that is taken for granted and is so important, but no one seems to be attempting to get parents more involved.
I know that many are struggling to make ends meet and that some parents have two or three jobs but a parent being involved in a child's education is one of the most critical elements in a child's development. It doesn't take much time, mostly an interest in their daily activities. If you can, drop by the school unannounced and stop by and watch the teacher's activities for 5 or 10 minutes. Parents who are able to attend field trips make a lasting impression on young minds. I am not suggesting doing their homework, I am suggesting listening to your student and become active in their education.
How to evaluate teacher performance is another area in which there never seems to be a solution. I would like to offer one idea for consideration, taken from the JD Powers playbook.
Why not have the students and their parents evaluate teachers? Much like JD Powers does for car companies, hotels, travel companies, etc..., send out an anonymous survey to students and families and get their opinions and have them score the teaching staff. Have the people with the most to lose or gain evaluate the teachers.
The currently used MEAP tests are under suspicion as to their validity. Some teachers teach for the test and waste a couple of weeks of a students time instead of teaching their curriculum.
Instead of MEAP test or in addition to the tests, why not ask the students and their parents?
posted by Brian J Perks at
8:28 AM
2 Comments:
Near the end the above author repeated the old cant about "teaching to the test, rather than the curriculum." Think about that for even a moment and realize what foolishness that is! That test, the MEAP is supposed to cover the curriculum. So teaching to that test is covering the curriculum or else the teacher is not teaching THE curriculum but is teaching one of his/her own.
It is true we do not really have a standard curriculum. We have only general guidelines as what should be known by a student at any particular point in their career. No teacher KNOWS what her students know or ought to know, just because they completed the year before. Actually the MEAP is an back door attempt to create a standardized curriculum. Often European school are held up as examples: every French student graduates knowing a certain set of information. One is not sure of the importance of say Medieval French poets, but since it is in the curriculum, the student knows it. Here, teachers see a need, attempt to fill it, and then are ridiculed by someone else because the student does NOT know something that others find important. Until we have a common curriculum, teachers will never meet expectations. Part of the reason that private schools are often given as examples is that they do have a common curriculum. As example, every Waldorf school world wide teaches certain information in the same grade. Ancient Germanic mythology in third grade and introduction to Indian myths and religion in fourth etc. And, interestingly, teachers follow the class through elemetary school. You know what your students know and don't know. Compare that with a large city public school where the class may turn over during the year. The teacher cannot even follow her students through the same year, much less several years.
Tom, thanks for your comments. What I meant about teaching to the test, rather than the curriculum is that some teachers spend a couple of weeks prior to the MEAP, teaching the kids or should I say coaching the kids how to answer the questions. Both my daughters complained about this when they were in school.
The answer might be a standardized curriculum. I am by no means faulting the teachers, more the system and the curriculum and the emphasis on athletics instead of academics.
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