It is just a week before state testing and to say I am overcome with a sense of urgency is an understatement. In fact I have come to loath the phrase “sense of urgency” since this seems to be my constant state.
This urgent, restless feeling that never seems to go away is not just about the test and making AYP, it is about the children who are still being underserved in our school. It is one thing to look at our past test scores and current benchmark test scores and analyze the data; it is another to look at the faces of the children these numbers represent.
I was in two classes recently where children were sitting idly while one teacher was working on her computer and another teacher was writing grades in a grade book. Brighton’s children cannot afford to lose instructional time. I do not know of many children who can, yet this continues to happen on a daily basis (in the same classes) at Brighton. I have concluded in this work you take baby steps forward, followed, at times, by a giant step backwards. This makes sustained change seem impossible.
On the other hand, I had a wonderful conversation with our reading coach, a classroom teacher, and a paraprofessional concerning one group of struggling fourth grade students who recently have made significant reading gains. The paraprofessional daily takes this group and pulls them a second time every afternoon to repeat the morning intervention lesson. As a result, these students are improving at a fast pace and it is such a joy to see the smiles on their faces. What a delight it was for me to give this paraprofessional a big thank you.
But I'm also thinking about what one of our district’s instructional support persons, who is coming out to teach two days a week in eighth grade, told me—how so many of our eighth graders are not able to read. My assuring her that future students will not be in this shape due to the changes in our K-5 program does nothing to help our exiting eighth grade students who have been so underserved. One of our most recent strategies to assist these students is to pull them from electives and put them with a teacher and a paraprofessional, and an individualized computer program. This is a test strategy, which we hope to continue for the remainder of the year, even though I strongly believe in providing our students with electives.
If we make AYP this year, we will be out of school improvement for the first time in five straight years and two other years further in the past. This is important to our school, our community, and our district. Yet making AYP does not mean that all of Brighton’s children have received a quality education or that they have the ability to go on to become a high school graduate.
It's the faces that haunt me, not the numbers. I cannot let this go. I know this is making me become quite obsessed about the obligation of all educators—especially those who are accomplished—to help correct this wrong.
I just read your article in Educational Week. I am a new high school English teacher (2nd year). In my first year at my current district, they gave me all high level English courses and charged me with developing a new AP English Lang and Comp class for next year. I work really long hours. The state is slow to recognize my masters degree as it was done in another country so I'm making about $6,000 less a year than I should be on our pay scale. My beef is this. My school has a a culture that rewards after school activities, primarily sports. So, the highest paid teachers are coaches and the activities director who teaches ASB, Leadership, and low impact fitness (walking around the track). I think math, science, English, and social studies teachers should be paid more than elective teachers who never have to take work home. If I weren't constantly grading papers, I could make more for the same hours by coaching something. As it is, I'm buried both weeknights and weekends. I think workload should be taken into account. I can see how this system at my school would be used by people to get more without doing as much. But if certain inherently more time-consuming, difficult jobs were paid better, that would help. This idea was put forth to my by a PE teacher that can teach math but refuses to do so because of the stress. She said she thinks it should go, in order of highest pay, English, math, science, social studies, non-academic electives. My union or the power brokers at my school would never go for that, though. I'm not unhappy where I am. I actually like it a lot, but there are some fundamental inequalities in the system that are both blatant and staggering.
I think the biggest problem with performance-based pay is that some teachers in the same subject get higher end students and some get stuck with the disaffected, perennially low achievers. I shouldn't necessarily get paid more for working with AP students than the special education teacher who might be trying to get a student to tie their own shoes or the classroom teacher working with ELL students mainstreamed into classes they aren't ready for. I think this could perhaps all work in the primary grades where the structure is so different, but I don't see how performance-based pay could ever work well in the secondary world.
Posted by: Andrew | April 13, 2007 at 10:50 AM