Monday, January 22, 2007

No Teacher Left Behind

This is from an email sent from the area supervisor to my principal who then forwarded it to every teacher at my school:

"Superior Leaders:
As you reflect on how you support engagement with learning through talk during the 3 Cs key roles (Collaborate, Classroom Visits and Coaching), what measurable goals do you see to determine the effectiveness of your leadership in teacher behavior change?"

I have no fucking clue what this says. I mean, I'm not illiterate; I can read the individual words, but "'Twas brillig and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe" makes more sense to me than this horseshit. Furthermore, why did my principal send it to all of us? Isn't this a message to the campus leader? My area supervisor and principal are nice people, and they are intelligent, but their communications are not intelligible.

This is why public schools suck. While I'm at it: I've said it before, so I'll say it again, No Child Left Behind is sleight of hand on the Bush Administration's part to make all public schools so bad that vouchers will seem like a good idea.

What's that? Vouchers were the sainted Milton Friedman's idea? Yeah? Well fuck him and his economic policies. He's dead and I'm competing with gang recruiters for attention. NCLB mandates that the only people who can switch schools to a "good" school are the worst students, or, in other words, the ones that made their home schools "bad" schools. So, we set an unrealistic goal ("All" kids will go to college, even the ones who have no desire to do so), then we set unrealistic passing scores ("Every" kid will pass a state test, even the illegal alien retards), and then we only fund the failing schools so that the passing schools can't afford to keep up with the massive influx of dumbshits, and to top it all off, we will federally mandate that passing schools MUST take the dumbshits. So yeah, fuck Milton Friedman's corpse or pile of ashes, whichever he opted for.

(Sorry for the bitterness. I'm not drunk, though that would have probably been my excuse about ten years ago. My friend and co-worker, Joe Paradis, died this morning of cancer. He was a couple of years from retirement, and I didn't get a chance to say good-bye. Joe liked a good conspiracy theory as much as the next English teacher, so this rant's for him. If nothing else, there aren't memos in Heaven.)

2 comments:

Gina said...

I'm a fan of public schools, but I don't want to send my kids there. I do, however, volunteer my time in schools where I use arts as tools for learning. For some free stuff see my blog...

Anonymous said...

The superintendent of the school district I work for has mandated that 95% of our student population will graduate on the "Recommended" plan and that at least 5% will graduate on the "Distinguished Achievement" plan. Now, in this district at least 3% of the population is mentally retarded. But, by golly, they will pass algebra 2, chemistry and 2 years of foreign language! And they will all pass TAKS! Go figure.