{"id":3038,"date":"2013-09-23T11:08:14","date_gmt":"2013-09-23T15:08:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=3038"},"modified":"2013-09-23T11:13:29","modified_gmt":"2013-09-23T15:13:29","slug":"the-teachers-vs-the-bean-counters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/miscellaneous\/the-teachers-vs-the-bean-counters\/","title":{"rendered":"The Teachers vs. the Bean Counters"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a horror story.\u00a0 I keep talking to teacher friends who are being crushed by the new system of legislature-mandated teacher evaluations here in CT.\u00a0 They don\u2019t talk about it publicly because they\u2019re too exhausted and time-starved to peep, and besides, if you speak up from within the system, you sound like a whiner or an incompetent.\u00a0 Teachers are already scared and demoralized, if not actually crying (and some are).\u00a0 They\u2019ve already been told point blank that by the end of the evaluations, no teacher will earn the score of \u201cExemplary.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course teachers should be evaluated.\u00a0 Of course bad teachers should be fired.\u00a0 But do we have to make every teacher into a bad teacher in the process?<\/p>\n

\"SandTable\"She\u2019s the last Kindergarten teacher on her team to have a sand table in her room.\u00a0 A teacher friend of mine with 40 years of experience, who sends 98% of her students on to first grade reading proficiently, is now required to submit test scores for her kids every two weeks, and to document every conversation and activity she does with them on a daily basis.\u00a0 She takes photos of group work to have a record of every lesson. \u00a0Yet evaluating her teaching, as required, is worse than pointless.\u00a0 It undermines time and energy she used to have for her students.\u00a0 If we\u2019re using test scores and student performance to evaluate teachers, then when will the scores be high enough that the expert teachers will be exempt?\u00a0 Why aren\u2019t they exempt already?<\/p>\n

It’s staggering to think what the time-intensive burden of accountability does to teachers who are not as on top of their game.<\/p>\n

The real problem is that we have somehow let the Bean Counters get in charge.\u00a0 They understand numbers that can be measured.\u00a0 They speak testing language.\u00a0 They create, publish, score, and make money off of tests that can reduce kids\u2019 performances to numbers.\u00a0 They argue that you can\u2019t argue with numbers.\u00a0 To them, it\u2019s tidy to take a complex system of 1,200 kids in a school and, say, look at their average 10th<\/sup> grade standardized test score for Math.\u00a0 You can pound your fist on the table over a score that is worse or better than that same score from last year.\u00a0 Now they want to use numbers to pound our teachers, and we\u2019re letting them do it.<\/p>\n

\"Out

Out of the Box<\/p><\/div>\n

Test scores do have some significance\u2014I\u2019m not saying they don\u2019t\u2014but they should not be driving education.\u00a0 That\u2019s backwards.\u00a0 Our kids should be sucking in new and exciting information.\u00a0 They should be psyched to go to school where concepts delight their minds and foster their creativity.\u00a0 They should be working hard to solve complex puzzles and discover how to live deeply, with guiding adults who can challenge and support them.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want our schools to specialize in teachers who excel at perpetually testing kids.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want our system to reward teachers who, at the expense of true teaching, are good at filling out forms, keeping records, and writing up goals on improving vertical scales.\u00a0 Teachers are experts.\u00a0 Because they are in classrooms every day with their students, they know what their students are learning and what they need to know.\u00a0 They see the progress week by week, and they see when and why kids are failing.\u00a0 Give teachers time to do their work, and they\u2019ll do it.<\/p>\n

We need to back off our teachers and let them do their jobs.\u00a0 It\u2019s time to get out of their way.\u00a0 If I had my dream, I would make this the year of no teacher evaluations and no standardized tests.\u00a0 Just one year.\u00a0 Imagine what could happen if we drove the bean counters out of the school.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a horror story.\u00a0 I keep talking to teacher friends who are being crushed by the new system of legislature-mandated teacher evaluations here in CT.\u00a0 They don\u2019t talk about it publicly because they\u2019re too exhausted and time-starved to peep, and besides, if you speak up from within the system, you sound like a whiner or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[55,356],"class_list":["post-3038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","tag-school","tag-teaching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3038"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3049,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3038\/revisions\/3049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}