PBS, IPI, NCLB, RT3, RTI, GLE, MAP, and constant assessments and scrutiny. No local control. People can legitimately complain about waste in education. They can look at the money we spend on stupid things and see money that could have gone into the classroom, to keep classes small, and to directly help students learn, and yet, we keep telling them that we don't have enough to pay the teachers we have a decent salary. We cut Career Ladder, Parents and Teachers, and good reasonable programs that directly affect classrooms, but we keep learning coaches and literacy specialists. We take special education and feed it to the alter of behavior interventions. We spend all our money to subscribe to assessment programs, internet record keeping for assessments, assessments of the assessments, but we don't give teachers the time or the will to act on what the assessments tells us. We jump on the bandwagon of national health programs, make the classroom teachers supervise them at the expense of even more "planning time". We remove all aspects of a grassroots movement and require collaboration with others at every level - lateral teams, spiral teams, grade level teams, behavior teams, building teams, and specialty teams. No where is individuality respected. No where is the teacher treated like a professional - even by those who climbed through their very ranks to achieve their high positions. No where is the teacher given the same respect as the patrons - the time to be with his/her family, the ability to sit down to a lunch or an uninterrupted planning time. No where is the teacher allowed to have an opinion; only the opinion of the edicts and proclamations being force fed to us. Dissension is bad, unacceptable, negative, unproductive, and undermining of the regime. No opinion is welcome unless it allows for poverty to be the greatest excuse for everything.
I can't put my finger on it...but maybe EVERYTHING is the reason. Good people, who have dedicated their lives to a noble career, who have committed themselves to future generations, who believe that the future should be better than the present, are now being shut down and shut up for the sake of a small number of people wielding tremendous power under the name of education reform. This is not the way to do it - we all know it's not - and yet there's not anything you can say about it, because no decision maker accepts any responsibility. They pass the buck to someone higher than they are and claim to be just as helpless. It's high time for superintendents to get together and say "no". Stand together and refuse the ultimatums, the earmarks, and red tape. It's time for school boards to stop spending money with strings attached and send the money back. We don't need that money - we need the money that can be spent in the best interest of the local community. It's time for teachers to take back our school system!
Untie my hands and let me do what I am good at doing. I used to be good at my job; now, I must stand where someone else stands me, say someone else's words, and smile when someone expects me to smile - and all the while, I am the one who takes the beating when their plans don't work. I could scream, but my scream is not heard in the educational vacuum of the 21st Century!
