I am frustrated. That is the best way to describe exactly what I have been feeling for the past several months.
For those of you that do not know, I am a teacher in an inner-city school in Memphis, TN. My coworkers and I are in the thick of it and I love it (for the most part, more to come on that). My students are incredible and because I don't have my own children at the moment, they take up the majority of my emotional and intellectual energy. They are all brilliant kids in their own way and it is a privilege to work with them everyday.
That being said, throughout the past year and a half, I have seen my kids suffer at the hands of the education system day in and day out. Not because of any actions of one particular person, but because of how the system is set up and how it functions. Now, before you start thinking "Oh, just another self-righteous teacher complaining about standardized tests and accountability," hear me out. I COULD NOT care less how my students standardized test scores reflect on me. For some of you, that may be shocking, but I really do have reasons for it. I hope you keep reading.
My coworkers and I are with these kids everyday for 8 hours, sometime more. We see them at their best and at their worst and we get to know A LOT about them in 9 months. I have the blessing of teaching kids multiple years in a row and through this I become very close with their families. All that to say, we know the kids. We as teachers are trained to recognize when they are growing and when they are not. When their light bulb goes off and when something is just not clicking. And, in my opinion, the majority of the time, this learning is not always demonstrated on a test that was created by God knows who in God knows where. Some of our students, yes, are very good test takers and that is awesome. But others are not. And should an entire year spent in a classroom be boiled down to a number that may or may not reflect what actually went on in the class?
I could go on an entirely separate rant/blog about testing bias, but I will save that for another time. Just trust me when I say it does in fact exist.
John Dewey is one of my favorite educational philosophers. Essentially, he believed that the purpose of education was to build thinkers who are prepared to participate in a democratic society. CRITICAL. THINKING. And yes, while in theory common core does emphasize critical thinking, the strict adherence to standardized testing has shifted kids away from thinking critically to being able to put arguments into specific templates that please the graders. So much of teaching is not just about reading and math, but about how to be good people and good participants in society. We teach about expressing your feelings, controlling your feelings, conflict resolution and ambition. None of this can be assessed on a test and yet it is what I feel is the most important job of a teacher.
I genuinely do not know what the solution to our educational woes are, but I do know this- we all have a voice. If you are a parent or brother or sister, call you congressperson and tell them what you think about everything that is going on in our educational system. Encourage your children to ask questions and become leaders and thinkers. I know too many good people who are involved in the education system one way or another and together I genuinely believe we can start to turn things around.
"While it is not the business of education to prove every statement made, any more than to teach every possible item of information, it is its business to cultivate deep-seated and effective habits of discriminating tested beliefs from mere assertions, guesses, and opinions; to develop a lively, sincere, and open-minded preference for conclusions that are properly grounded, and to ingrain into the individual’s working habits methods of inquiry and reasoning appropriate to the various problems that present themselves" - John Dewey
