Dear President Obama,
I am disheartened by the state of education and the course we are heading as a nation.
Today, I was forced to administer an assessment which will be used to judge me, as a professional educator. I watched eight year olds crumble under the pressure for fear of getting an answer wrong. I held a young girl who burst into tears because she couldn’t decipher a term she will not be exposed to until January. As a compassionate human being, I reassured her, but deep down inside I was sickened, disgusted and angry knowing this is the path that education has taken. This assessment will be used to determine whether I am highly qualified and effective enough to carry out the responsibilities of my job.
This test will be compared with a second assessment given in the spring, created by a testing company led by individuals who consistently demonstrate a true disconnect from the reality of education, as they are more interested in making money than fostering learning centered on the whole child. Gone is the creativity that once ran free in our schools.
Walk our halls and you will discover test-taking taught as a genre. You will find children forced to engage in learning for exorbitant amounts of time even though they are not developmentally ready as this builds stamina and stamina is required for the six, ninety minute assessment sessions my third graders will be required to take this spring.
If you are lucky enough to witness children on a playground, you will quickly observe they struggle to act socially because time for play has been tossed aside making room for more and more curricular demands. As educators, our plates are full. We spend countless hours beyond the school day trying to plan purposeful and meaningful lessons, correcting the numerous assessments we administer while keeping up-to-date on our forever changing professional development. The state of exhaustion runs rampant in this profession.
When I look at my colleagues, I see the flame of hope and empowerment slowly fading away because we are being forced to make miracles from the six hours we work with children full knowing when a child is at home his greatest teacher, the parent(s) is making the most profound effects on his future.
It is time to reconfigure education and make decisions based on sound educational research. A school is not a business; we cannot expect children to perform above and beyond their intellectual abilities. Educational decisions must be made with the voices and knowledge of those on the front lines, in the classrooms, working with the children and communities to whom we serve; the teachers.
Respectfully submitted, Robyn Brydalski Third Grade Teacher Kenmore, New York
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Robyn,
You have clearly expressed the heartache that teachers are feeling all over this country. Thank you.
Thoughtful, heartfelt letter. Exemplifies the profession. Thank you.
Hello,
I understand that a lot of people don’t like to give high stakes testing and that they have created what economists call a ‘perverse incentive’ to teach to the test at the cost of non-tested portions of the curriculum. However, as a dyslexic, I would have preferred more testing-based evaluation (objective) and less teacher-based evaluation (subjective) when I was in school.
While I had many excellent teachers and received a great deal of help throughout school from some specific individuals, there were a number of times where I was evaluated very differently on the same material both by a teacher (class grade) and by a standardized test. There were cases of this mismatch ranging from being diagnosed with Dyslexia and getting the help I needed, to getting a barely passing grade in a class but the highest possible score on the standardized test.
Overall, I felt that as someone outside the ‘80%’ that educational training addresses, I was served poorly by a small but noticeable fraction of teachers, and additional mandatory testing would have helped me earlier in my education (being identified as dyslexic earlier) through the end of high school.
Anyway, I’m sure it’s not pleasant to administer high stakes tests, and I’m not sure what age they should be given (or what should be tested), but at a personal level I would have preferred more.
As a teacher next door in the city of Buffalo, I understand completely. Robyn, you spoke so eloquently for all public school teachers across this nation. Thank you for taking the time to do it. It is time for all of us teachers to come together and make sure our voices are heard. This is a good start. I will share it with all of my colleagues.
Thank you for putting your colleague’s feelings into tactful words, Robyn. Thank you.
Thank you for putting into words what all of us are feeling.
Excellent letter. As an educator myself, you expressed how we are all feeling.
The politics and business of education should have nothing to do with the real education that is taking place on the front lines. It is so disturbing to think that here in NY State we have the former chairman of Citigroup (the banks) as the head of our “reform party” in NYS. Appointed by Coumo himself. Where are the teachers in this process? When was the last time he taught a class? Really?
It is unreal. It is unacceptable!
As a teacher I would never pretend to be able to run a bank. Although I’d like to thank the banks and Wall Street for running our country straight into the ground!
SLO’s are the biggest waste of tax payer dollars in years. I wasted the first week of school giving a test that most of my students failed. Why? They haven’t learned any of the material yet? Duh! I wasted the valuable 1st week of school establishing procedures and setting the tone of expectation. How much valuable teaching time has been taken away because of SLO’s. The “Gotcha” for this generation of teachers.
It is sad! When did teachers stop being respected? When did politicians who have never taught a day in their lives get to make policies on education. The simple fact that we are administering SLO’s proves they have no clue what they are doing. They are making it up as they go.
Several areas of teaching still have no idea of what is happening…the State hasn’t figured out how they are going to administer their SLO? But it is in full effect for this year!
In the balance…during their guessing game…are the lives of the teacher and the very students we are working to educate.
Great letter! I only wish the President would respond to you. I hope it falls on the eyes and ears of everyone in the politics and the business of education.
Those that actually teach and are on the front lines…get it.
As a mom and as a student affairs professional, I could mot agree with you more. Thank you for stating all of this so gracefully and eloquently.
As I read this post, tears fill in my eyes. I cry for the teachers and for the children. I also cry for the parents. My Facebook post last night was about my kindergartener crying over her homework. She was required to complete a math page (front and back), a rhyming worksheet, and color it in neatly. While this doesn’t seem like a lot of work, and I personally do not feel it was a lot, my daughter felt it was a lot.
She is five. She wants to be outside playing in the rain with her sister and puppy-dog. She wants to be playing with her dolls, and her dress-up drawer. She wants to have her cousins come over so they can swing in the yard. She wants to jump in leaves and get muddy.
We do all of this. It’s about balance.
We are trying very hard to balance our work and play. We practice writing her name, our fire escape route, using flashcards for number recognition, play Go Fish with number cards, recite our address at the dinner table, practice our alphabet from the beginning, end, and randomly, we read our library books and are reading our books to different stuffed animals. We watch television. We dance to music and make-up songs for rhyming. We also put puzzles together and bake cookies, getting flour all over our diningroom. This is what balance is all about.
While I do understand the pressure teachers are under, as an educator myself, I plead, I beg for teachers to try hard to keep that balance. I pray that teachers will have student’s participate in book buddies. I pray that teachers may be able to incorporate a ‘play center’ during center time to work on speaking and listening standards–and most importantly to help children build an imagination. I beg that teachers do not build stamina with giving practice NYS Assessments, rather build it through using DEAR Time and Writing Workshop…practices that make sense to both educators and students.
As a parent of two children in Kenmore, I want to thank the teachers at my daughter’s school. I see this balance happening. I see kind and caring teachers who are giving it their all and then some. I hear about the 3rd graders reading to the kindergarteners, I hear about my daughter learning about sequencing and see this through the work she is bringing home. I see my youngest daughter working on letter recognition in positive ways…being a word detective, singing songs, and using the SMART Board to assist her in this learning.
Thank You. Thank you for finding that balance.
I pray that it continues.
Please teachers, you are way too important to get bogged down by pre and post assessments, SLOs, and APPR.
I know it is such a difficult task, but I pray that you stay true to who you are as an educator and continue to give it your all. The children and parents need you to.
We love Thomas Jefferson and the staff that IS making a difference in the lives of so many children.
Thank you, to all of you.
then how do you judge, across the school, city, state, and country, whether or not a teacher is doing a good job or not? What is a better solution to evaluating them?
Maybe if teacher unions allowed poor teachers to be fired, we wouldn’t have to jump through these excessive testing hoops
The unions do not prevent the removal of poor teachers, the ineptitude of administration does this. Your complaint is misdirected. Ask administration why they don’t take the time and effort to do their jobs. Unions just protect us from capricious and mendacious administrators. Tenure is granted by administration. It also does not guarantee me a job, it only ensures that I must be fired for a good reason. Would you stake your job on what a child might do on one given day? Learning is not just the responsibility of the teacher. All concerned parties must be actively involved.
I could not agree more with this letter. As a Special Education Teacher, I can say that no one sees the fear and tears more than those in the special education realm. My students, who have been identified and have IEPs stating that they are not intellectually capable of completing grade level work, are required to take the same tests along side their peers.
Yes, I can read the content area exams to them, but it doesn’t help if they are unable to retain the information. The ELA exams are even more upsetting because I am forced to put grade-level text in front of them, read the directions and set them off on their own to read, comprehend, infer, and then do writing pieces incorporating what they learned in the passage.
I work hard everyday and love my students more than anything. I teach the same thing, in different ways everyday, and the next day they come back and look at me like I am speaking a foreign language when I ask them to do the exact same thing we did the day before.
Additionally, I have classroom teachers pushing my students away. Yes, I get graded based on how they perform in their special classes with me, but those teachers are getting graded on their performance in all other areas. They are no longer being referred to as “our students” but now they are my students and I am constantly being told they do not belong. It is breaking my heart because I spend my days striving to have my students as mainstreamed as possible in the least restrictive environment.
This will only get worse. Tension is high, work days are long and there are no longer days off. I know I personally am at work until 5 or 6 every night and spend my weekends developing my lesson plans or collecting my APPR artifacts to “prove” that I am a good teacher. At school teachers are crying after school and snapping at each other due to the overwhelming amount of stress that we are all under. If things do not change I am afraid of where things are heading.
But K, I think you are highlighting most of the public’s concern. Think about it . If tenure ensures you must be fired “for a good reason”, how then can you be fired for poor performance as a teacher? My understanding is that you would really have to do something off the charts to be fired once you have tenure.
Absolutely true, K. Spradlin. Administration has three years to get rid of “incompetent” teachers; this can be done without benefit of any appropriate cause and the district does not have to provide a reason for not granting tenure…poof, a teacher can be easily let go. In my experience, this does not happen very often, but, when it does, if the district has followed procedures, the union can do nothing about it, whether the decision to offer a tenured appointment is “fair” or not. To that end, the district can attach its own higher expectations as requirements for offering tenure. For example, the district I taught in for many years rather capriciously decided that all of their newly tenured teachers needed to be permanently certified, so they made completion of a Masters degree mandatory before the tenure appointment was issued. This was decided with no warning to the teachers who were tenure candidates, and the union was powerless to act in their defense, other than to demand a fourth year of a probationary appointment. So there is plenty of opportunity for a district to divest themselves of teachers not working up to expectations. For various reasons, administrators rarely take advantage of this opportunity. Perhaps if administrators were not so busy “inputting data”, they would have enough time to devote to supervising and mentoring new teachers, getting to know them, understanding what’s happening in their classrooms, and, yes, occasionally counseling teachers out of the profession when it’s obviously a bad fit. They would have time to work with teachers to develop meaningful curricula, provide staff development that fosters the kind of school culture that promotes engaged teaching and learning, and to promote school management policies that provide clear expectations to students and parents about personal responsibility.
There are plenty of fingers to be pointed, but they are not all directed at teachers and their unions. I wish the politicians understood that. But it’s another example of going after the low-hanging fruit…
ok…so what about after three years? If a teacher performs well until they are tenured, then they have free reign to underperform for the next 27? You think that is ok? People in all walks of life get comfortable after a while, especially when they know they cannot be fired unless they “really” screw up. These teachers know that they can’t be fired just for underperforming consistently
Tenure guarantees that you are given a hearing before you are dismissed, and that you are given just cause for dismissal. It is not a free pass to a lifetime job. Look at it from a teacher’s perspective: How can you do your job effectively, or work toward long-term goals if you are subject to dismissal at the whim of the next school board or superintendent of schools? There are reasons, incompetence being one, that you can be terminated. I didn’t join the union for a few years, mid-career, after our union defended a tenured teacher who was woefully incompetent and was eventually dismissed. Later, I came to realize that the next teacher the unon might be called upon to defend might be a teacher whose failings weren’t as blatant, or who was not acccused had perhaps just offended someone important with a chance comment . I once had a school board member threaten me with a tenure hearing (not his decision to make, BTW)after his grandson reported that I had urged the third graders to vote for his opponent in a school board election. I had not…only a far more foolish tperson than I would do something like that in a small town, but I HAD urged the children to encourage their parents to vote. If it hadn’t been for the protection of tenure, a situation like that could have mushroomed into something divisive for all concerned. That is the kind of situation tenure is designed to protect teachers, and schools, against. And it has been my non-scientific observation over more than 30 years of experience that tenured teachers rarely change their stripes after the initial three years. Maybe they become a bit bolder…participate in job actions, speak out at meetings, take work home instead of buring the midnight oil in the classroom. But a good teacher is a good teacher,,,you can almost spot them from day one.
By the way, I STILL haven’t heard another solution for getting rid of poor performing teachers (other than by evaluating tests) for those teachers in years 4-30
We are evaluated every year. My administration spends up to 90 minutes per week observing me. My lesson plans are reviewed to see that they are aligned to the curriculum, I am on several school committees, I meet with parents and file remediation plans for students that are not progressing adequately as defined by my district. If I fail in my professional duties then I can be terminated. I can not guarantee what students will do, I can only make every effort to help them learn. I have fed some of my students and helped them get glasses. I can not make them do their work or care about education. Just like your doctor can’t make you exercise, loose weight, take your medicine,and drop bad habits, I am limited. Parents ask me what they can do, I tell them they can read to and with their child at night, shut off the t.v. and video games, and talk about the day at school. They ignore me, the kid stays up all night on the X-box, and still reads almost as poorly as they did last year. You want to tell me it is my fault. By the way, this same student completed their state CRT reading test in 5 minutes without even opening the test booklet, they just filled in bubbles and declared themselves finished. During testing you can not say anything to the student. Would you stake your job on this child? This is what you are asking of us.
Our profession has been made the scapegoat for the ills of our society by our political system. In some way we have no one to blame but ourselves for not addressing our failures as a profession. As a nation we spend billions of dollars a year on education and our leaders, both democratic and republican have vilified teachers and administrators.
There are two simple solutions to the problem. First, as a profession we must police ourselves and be willing to weed out those in our profession that pull us down. Those people that do not teach or administer at a high level. We are only as good as our weakest link. The current “flavor of the month” is not going to raise the bar for kids and it’s going after all educators not the ones that need to go. A huge percentage of teachers and administrators do a great job.
Second our society needs to stop comparing us to the rest of the industrial world’s top students. Most every country we are compared with in the world for accademic achievement gives an exam to enter high school. Kids are weeded and seperated our by ability. WE DON”T DO THAT!! We teach all kids from the least to the best and wonder why our results don’t stack up. If you want us to compare apples to apples and focus on high accademic abilities then we need to do something differently. Doing that will require a very different way we currently address those of lesser accademic abilities. Are we ready to talk about that in our country?
I could go on and I usually do, but this is enough!
That’s so true, Mike…another aspect of education reform that is usually forgotten when comparisons are made. It’s another whole argument, and is really rather irrelevant to the topic of this thread, but needs to be brought into big-picture discussions. Thanks for reminding us.
we aren´t doing that bad in Europe yet, but considering that I live in Spain black clouds are covering our future, all my support for al of you and watch out with the politicians they are all the same.
K, I am by no means insinuating that it is your fault that some students have poor parents. I am however a realist. I know many teachers, some are family members and some are dear friends. Most of the teachers I know are great teachers. Just like most of my private sector co-workers are great contributors. But in both organizations, the bad ones have to be pruned or else you drag down the school or company. I have first hand knowledge that it is nearly impossible to fire a teacher in years 4-30 for just sub-par performance. I think teachers ARE overburdened with all these assessments. I also think that we lose something by taking away the children’s ability to be kids and go outside an play for 20 minutes. But, like you, I want to see this situation improve. Most people like me would stand behind the teachers to eliminate this over-assessment situation if teacher unions would compromise and make it easier to just fire the bad teachers in years 4-30 if they are found to not be doing their jobs. (and yes parents have an enormous part in all of this, but this conversation is about what is in our control to change and what the realistic solutions can be). Let’s not kid ourselves and say that teachers unions are all about the children, because by definition they are not
So very tired of your line of argument.
No other profession or career suffers the same intense scrutiny through the application of disproven VAM methodology.
The managers in other organizations are able to make personnel decisions. Yet, somehow, you feel the principals and superintendents are not to be trusted in the same way.
And to suggest that you would support teachers’ who despair of the unfair testing of their students IF ONLY the union would make it even easier to fire without due process, is an odd offer.
Why wouldn’t you want to put the children’s needs first?