A conference being held locally in February accepted my proposal to present on equitable access to education and the need to go beyond making everything the same for everyone. I was excited and proud to have been accepted, but today I made the decision to decline. Between my job teaching and my doctoral courses, with the added effort to become a National Board Certified Teacher this cycle, I simply cannot put the deserved attention to the presentation that it deserves.
The paper outlines why a cookie-cutter idea of "education for all" has not worked and will not work for our students, especially those who enter school without the ideal pre-exposure to goals and methods. This approach has led to less and less attainment of "proficiency" on artificially created and manipulated "goals." In a school building where teachers teach all day and students sit all day every day hearing what the teachers teach, just pure luck would dictate that students would have at least a ten per cent proficiency on the material being taught. However, they are not tested on the material taught, but on manufactured ideas which are deliberately confusing and poorly-worded so that the teacher cannot even grade the assessments without the answer key. It should be clear that if the teacher who deals with the material every day all day is unable to say which answer is correct, there is a problem. If the teacher, who has already mastered the material and is teaching it to students, is unable to pass the assessment, something is wrong. Now, we could blame the "ineffective" or "Less than intelligent" teacher, but the district gave that individual his or her position based on qualifications, grades, scores and a battery of interviews. In that process, somewhere someone should have noticed that the teacher had no idea about the material. That being the case, let's not continue to blame the teachers. If the teacher does not know the material, or how to impart it to the students, let us put the blame on those who put that teacher in the classroom: administrators, politicians and voters who have made the local market for teachers so poor that those who are qualified and ready to teach have all left for greener pastures.
Now, assuming that the hired teachers are at least minimally qualified (which, by law, they are required to be), let's look again at why the test questions cannot be answered. We cannot truly expect that a child, newly exposed to concepts and ideas, can answer better than the educated adult hired to impart knowledge and ideas to the students, but the current system clearly does expect the impossible. I would wager that not many of us got into education and teaching to spend our time failing students or passing students who should have not passed. Personally, I have seen students truly not ready to advance to the next grade advance based solely on the fact that they are labeled "exceptional children," while at the same time, I have seen students who have a grasp on the ideas and concepts unable to pass the standardized assessments held back and their self-esteem and efforts trampled upon.
So, we build up the students who have labels and even stop taking the time to make sure these students truly learn, and the students learn to make excuses because they will pass anyway...while holding back students who put all of their effort into their work and their tests, who can and do demonstrate mastery in alternative formats. This will create an endless cycle of doubt in those pre-disposed to make their best effort and over-confidence and entitlement in those who put forth zero effort. This is simply a microcosm of what one sees every day in our society and political system...those who have the ideas and solutions stay out of the limelight because of their own self-doubt while the privileged and entitled run things unopposed.
Until we fix how things are done in schools, we cannot fix the bigger issue, and until we fix the societal issues, we will never get the support to fix the schools. So, what is to be done, and when??
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