Susan Barber, chair of the English department at Northgate High School in Coweta County, Georgia, wrote a letterd to State Superintendent Richard Woods.
Her message: “Please protect my instructional time. I want to teach my students…..”
“I love students, and I love teaching. I want to be a teacher who is “part of the solution and not part of the problem,” which is harder and harder to do in education today. While I have little control over decisions on a large-scale, my mind is continually thinking on and dreaming of ways to make my classroom, and our system, better.
“I believe the greatest and most under tapped resource in Georgia’s education system today is Georgia teachers, but the good teachers are starting to leave….
“If I am going to be measured on how well my students read and write, I need more time to teach them to read and write. Some days I feel I spend more time getting my plans properly formatted, administering standardized tests, and going to professional development meetings on the state evaluation system or Georgia Milestone than I do teaching. These things are needed and necessary, but when they interfere with my ability and time to teach, there is a serious problem.
“Please protect my instructional time. I want to teach my students.
“My students need me to teach them. Please protect our administrators’ time by allowing them to be about the business of curriculum planning, strategic and long-term goal setting, and spending quality time with teachers and students.
“In addition to instructional time being used for testing, the amount of money devoted to testing is mind-boggling. Almost $108 million has been designated for the Georgia Milestone assessment. As department chair at my high school, every year I have to tell my team that we will once again not get new textbooks. We have been through three adoption cycles now without new books. I beg that state money will be funneled to where it is most needed – students.
“Students do not directly benefit from testing, yet that is where the money goes. I understand this is a complex issue with federal and state requirements to be fulfilled, but our students are suffering while political gains are being made. We must put a stop to this.
“Testing does offer some advantages. I am not a proponent of throwing out tests all together. Schools should be held accountable on student learning as well as teacher instruction, but we have swung so far to one side that there is no longer balance in the system.
“Testing does not measure a student’s growth in his or her love for learning or the development of grit. Testing does not measure a student’s thought process or style of writing. Testing does not measure the ability to apply knowledge or creative problem solving. I would like to think that these are some of the most important skills students learn in school today, yet they count for nothing in regard to my evaluation or my school’s performance.
“The system today is defined by terms such as CCSS, TKES, LKES, CCRPI, GHSGT, GAPS, SACS, CRCT, GMAS, SGAs, SLOs, yet all I want to do is teach SCHOOL. Give me and my colleagues the freedom to do what we are trained to do and what we love doing.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
in the WITTT section of my own website ( she I get the time to put it up I will deal with THE TRUTH ABOUT … What It Takes To Teach: what a teacher really needs and what actually goes into teaching a lesson on ANYTHING/
Imagine a doctor in his office (my son is a cardiologist) being told what to do IN EVERY FACET OF HIS PRACTICE… after all his years of education and EXPERIENCE.
IN 1963 when I began to teach, I had to fashion each lesson TO MEET SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES according ot what I knew wAs best practice…in fact I needed help and got none. Experience taught me what worked, and what didn’t.
IN MY LAST YEARS when I was under assault, even as Harvard observed me, the school dictator would come in and ‘write me up’ (document my incompetence) according to some subjective rubric to prove my incompetence…even though my students were at the TOP OF THE STATE not just NYC on standardized tests.
THAT says it all about what is happening to Georgia teacher and the profession. ‘Top-down’ has replaced ‘bottom-up’ as the publisher at Oped, Rob Kall, would phrase it, BUT this is a PROFESSION.
Simply put, the PROFESSION that is pedagogy has been co-opted by a business world that TRAINS EMPLOYEES so the top-down management can rule the roost. If the business fails, the manager is fired.
In the school workplace, when the kids fail (and even when they don’t) the teacher is sent packing because the PUBLIC does not comprehend a complex PROFESSION and can be bamboozled by any Magic Elixir: No Evidence required!
http://www.opednews.com/articles/BAMBOOZLE-THEM-where-tea-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-110524-511.html
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Magic-Elixir-No-Evidence-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-130312-433.html
What more do you need to know! The media is bought http://billmoyers.com/segment/john-nichols-and-robert-mcchesney-on-big-money-big-media/
and they enabled Duncan and clones to dominate the narrative about education.
LikeLike
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
LikeLike
On boy, does this letter resonate with me! I loved the classroom and the interaction with my students. During the short time I was in a public school classroom as the teacher of record, I saw that time whittled down by bureaucratic minutia. Testing and the accumulation of data was just beginning to gain a foothold. It has gotten so much worse since I left almost four years ago. For quite awhile I mourned the end of my teaching career. Now, I can’t imagine going back, and I cannot recommend that anyone else become a teacher. They have legalized child abuse and almost destroyed the teaching profession.
LikeLike
I often say the same thing. I could never teach now. I would have to defend everything I used or said in those weekly letters to my 13 year old students, where I spoke honestly about human behavior that we witnessed in our literature and in our history texts, and current events.
Now, I would fear that parents would attack me for examining literature with views that do not match their own, and administrators could harass me with parent complaints.
Of the 1000 students who were in the humanities literature and communication arts program I created, i received only praise from parents, who were thrilled that I was examining ideas that were important as the kids moved into an adult world.
I would be mincemeat today, but then, if I were there, I would be using their curricula, and mandated materials, not those I developed during decades of professional best practice, which earned me the top honor in NYS for English teachers, form NYSEC.
In fact, months after I received the Educator of Excellence award, and the same year students raves included me in Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers (for the 4th time) . I was charged by corrupt superintendent in NYC, with incompetence … because of one simple fact… there is no sixth amendment rights for teachers in the education workplace (i.e. Schools)
THAT is why VAM works… how else could such nonsense be used to damn a professional
http://www.perdaily.com/2011/01/lausd-et-al-a-national-scandal-of-enormous-proportions-by-susan-lee-schwartz-part-1.html
LikeLike
My last PBA PARCC test is on Wednesday, March 11. I found out today that I have 4 weeks to teach the rest of my curriculum, because we will begin testing again the 2nd week of April. I am beyond discouraged. There is no way that I can have my students ready in 4 weeks with the rest of the much harder common core curriculum. It is not humanly possible.
LikeLike
“Testing does not measure a student’s growth in his or her love for learning or the development of grit. Testing does not measure a student’s thought process or style of writing. Testing does not measure the ability to apply knowledge or creative problem solving.”
Testing doesn’t “measure” anything. The “testing measures something” paradigm needs to come to its historical end soon. A new paradigm of learner/teacher collaboration in assessing a student’s learning needs to replace the “testing measures” meme.
LikeLike
Ah, Duane… a new paradigm sneered, but the end of public education is an absolute necessity for the oligarchs. The first thing to go was education when austerity was foisted on the public at the very time when a stimulus was needed.
The charlatans are in charge, and they feed an already stressed citizenry with lies and propaganda. Men who vie to be leaders espouse nonsense and outright lies. I watch as our next generation abandons reading and language, and buries their attention in ‘black mirrors.’
Wht scares me the most, is not the outrageous things the NY times spots as truth but that my son, who is 46 and a doctor, argues with me about things that I know are simply not true… he has bought the propaganda, even though he struggles to make ends meet (because he pays 25k per child, at a private school. Imagine… a college tuition for a first grade student, and again in the second grade, and so on… and he thinks it is liberal spending policies of the democrats, and busy into the entitlement nonsense while trillions of corporate money is offshore.
I don’t have much hope.
LikeLike
I think it’s great that this teacher was able to speak up about the truth in her classroom. I hope more can continue to do the same!
LikeLike