intertribal: (every night i call your name)
[personal profile] intertribal
[The job being: I'm a Project Assistant for a university professor who gets contracts from the state department of education to do research on whatever the department wants to know about.  Last year it was the transition to a new testing program.  This year's project, failing schools, is one I've been involved with the whole way.] 

I don't have an education background at all, and all of this is of course based on a sampling of Nebraska schools that are classified as failing in some way, and not meant to be conclusive.  

1.  Failing schools have "difficult" demographics.  Either there's a lot of minorities or there's a lot of poverty or both.  Indian schools fail almost by default in this state.  There is a crazy superintendent man who jumps from Indian school to Indian school, misusing funds and planning new buildings.  Research says you can't fix most schools that chronically fail. 

2.  Principals harbor a lot of pent-up rage toward Hispanic students that move, because they don't want to have to implement an ELL program and the students bring down their scores and then move away.  As a result, people will either build new school districts away from urban centers to stay away from all the minorities, or will force the minorities to stay in their own school district outside of the urban center.  And by urban center, I mean like, 20,000 people.  Some principals will tell Hispanic students to go to a different school.  This is actually illegal.  

3.  It feels like there are a lot of kids being placed in special education, especially in small rural schools.  Whether that's a jump in awareness, a jump in diagnoses, or a jump in actual prevalence of cases, I don't know.

4.  Most parents don't get involved except to complain, or so teachers say.  Many parents seem scarred by negative experiences when they were in school, and in any case are too tired from working thousands of shifts at finger-chopping meatpacking plants to sign little worksheets saying they read to their kids or checked their kids' progress.  In "diverse" schools, schools invite white parents to be a part of parent committees. 

5.  Older teachers mock younger teachers for being panicky or "too creative."  Younger teachers mock older teachers for having been there "since the building was built."  Everyone will say that there is collaboration in their school, but I seriously wonder, considering all the passive-aggressive stuff that comes out in interviews. 

6.  A lot of times students need to be bribed to try to do well on tests with pizza parties and cupcakes.  High school students. 

7.  Schools seem to think that an inability to do story problems in math can be solved by upping reading comprehension skills.  I can say for one that this would not have helped me. 

8.  Some teachers want to be part of a unified curriculum, and some teachers want to be able to do whatever they want.  If you bring up changes or research or anything, these latter teachers will say, "I've been teaching for X-years, I would hope that I know what I'm doing!"  Few are comfortable being assessed, critiqued, criticized, or judged in any way.  Principals say they assess teachers more than teachers say they are assessed.  Schools are distrustful of outsiders, especially outsiders from "the government."  Outsiders want the state to intervene in failing schools, possibly by firing principals that are judged to be ineffective, but neither the state nor the schools want this. 

9.  Education is something that the general public goes absolutely crazy on.  It's getting close to the level of abortion et al.  There's basically 3 perspectives: 1) "Public school is a black hole and public schools should receive no money.  Why should I have to give them my hard-earned tax dollars when I don't have kids/my kids go to my super awesome ["exclusive"] private school?" 2) "Stop blaming the socio-economic environment.  Tell those kids/teachers to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.  Motivate them harder!" 3) "I'm a teacher and I think you're being really mean to teachers, because they would give up body parts for their students and they love these kids more than their own parents love 'em and they are really trying the best they can!"  Most of the people with the loudest opinions do not actually have kids in public school.  See #4.

10.  There is a minimum proficiency that all students, regardless of poverty, ethnicity, English-speaking status, or special education status, are expected to reach for the school to not "fail."  It is the same standard for all these groups. 

Date: 2010-05-10 09:57 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] selfavowedgeek.livejournal.com
Nadia, I really appreciate your education posts. I've been teaching in my home county for thirteen years. We're a small high school--butting up against the big 1k. That said, we're not a failing school, but we've definitely fallen into the various NCLB brackets of grad rate issues and math/LA AYP. But there is that constant tug-of-war between federal/state mandates, i.e., testing the bejeezus out of kids and just plain ol' teaching of content and for that ideal of the gleaning of the well-rounded student. Most of the kids I teach will stick around and go into a family-owned business and/or have grease/dirt/other under their fingernails the rest of their working lives. The ones who go off to college will usually return if (1) they go into education and come home to teach or (2) come home to take on (and over) the family business.

RE: Parental involvement--beyond academic booster clubs, very little, which is pretty much a common cultural/societal issue.

Date: 2010-05-10 11:07 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] intertribal.livejournal.com
The AYP rules are slightly insane, IMO. Yours sounds like a school somewhere between my high school (in the state capital, which isn't saying much) and the schools I was interviewing, where nobody gets out, period. It's funny, because education in some ways is so deceptively simple: "do what's best for the kids"; when in reality the whole thing is a tight rope between competing authorities and impulses and goals.

Yeah, I'm not sure how high parental involvement is ever going to be outside of a certain subset of small upper-middle-class schools. But there seems to be a lot of pressure on schools to involve parents - part of this I think is because of the perception that parents need more autonomy (to choose charter/voucher schools and such), and part of it is because parents do need to be involved in order to encourage kids. It's a conundrum.

Date: 2010-05-11 01:16 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] selfavowedgeek.livejournal.com
It is a very, very tight rope indeed. Parental involvement is a tricky and sometimes touchy subject. Sometimes my wife and I have a real problem, logistically speaking, being involved. She also teaches, and there are simply too many occasions when we just can't swing going on some field trip or coming to the school to volunteer our time/services because, well, we're investing in our respective schools-as-communities. It can be frustrating, so I can empathize with those parents who are working their tails off and who would otherwise *be* there. I mean, I teach plenty of kids who are pretty much independent students due to one parent's working first shift and the other working third shift. At best they're going to see one bone-tired parent until bedtime, barely see the other once they themselves are getting ready for school . . .

We'll be graduating the seniors in two weeks. In a sad many cases, that'll be one of the few times a parent has been able or willing to show up at a school in support of the child's educational pursuits. [sarcasm] Outside sports, of course. [/sarcasm]

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