December62009
inconclusive attempts at improvement
I have a potential reason to be hopeful !! At the end of a really useless professional development on Friday about discipline from the deans (have I mentioned the high school dean before? I’m not sure what she does cause she’s not really in the halls checking for anything except uniforms - more on this in a minute), we were shepherded into the computer lab to take an online survey from the administration about the current state of the school. Questions included ranking how supported we feel, how our classes are going, etc. Though initially skeptical, page two was full of open ended questions! Rejoice! Nothing makes this disgruntled, talkative and opinionated teacher more happy than being able to tell the people who can change it EXACTLY what the problems are AND even provide potential solutions (could we make it any easier?!) since they don’t seem to know it themselves. My responses included lots of words like “emergency” and “low morale” and “failing” etc. It also included the following, which is a summary of sorts of most of my problems with the school right now:
On Thursday’s community meeting, the dean talked at length with the students about the uniform policy and rattled off the ways that it would be daily monitored, that no excuses would be accepted, and the myriad of consequences that would follow for students who were not dressed appropriately. She said that she is taking a stand for what the school stands for. I stood at the front my class in some kind of shock, thinking, “Our school stands for … uniforms? That’s it?” If we’re actually about educating our kids and not just making sure they’re wearing the right t-shirt, we need MANY MANY MORE school wide priorities and policies related to students ACADEMIC achievement. A kid failing but in his uniform still isn’t going to graduate.
Thursday is also the day that I have my inquiry team meeting. The inquiry team is a group that looks at the school’s data in depth and produces sub-groupings, a focus on the bottom third of our school, and lots of pretty graphs and reports to show visitors and put in large binders. We’re supposed to use this to learn more about the kids and, based on this information, what we should do to teach them better (which, of course, means a higher standardized test score). Most of the inquiry team meetings are taken up by discussions of the middle school data. When I asked the head data specialist (our creative writing teacher - everyone’s got multiple roles here) about what the data focus was going to be for the high school, she replied, “They’re not doing any school wide focus on the high school. They’re going to leave it up to the individual teachers to decide who to focus on in their own data analysis.” She paused for a second after seeing my facial expression and continued, “It seems like they’re really just focusing on making the middle school strong so that it can feed into the high school later. They’re pretty much ignoring the current high school.”
See why its so hard to have hope here?!! !! I am generally an optimistic person though and so my new hope is this: the chorus of high school teachers writing all that is wrong in the SURVEYS (as opposed to the meeting notes where similar things have been written but seem to fall on deaf ears) will become so CLEAR and URGENT in the eyes of the administration and CHANGE WILL HAPPEN. YES WE CAN!
Tags: /small reforms /optomism /priorities
