Politicians should not make these decisions

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Politicians should not make these decisions

Opinions

Saturday, 17 April 2010 00:00

By Amanda Youngblood
As a teacher in Florida, I struggle to describe how frustrated I feel when teachers are thrown under the bus and made the scapegoats for so many of the issues in our society. And although I know our state is financially strained and we didn’t make it to the winner’s round in the Race to the Top, I’m not that upset about that. Throwing money at a mess doesn’t make it a better mess. It forces us to take a hard look our education system.
That said, here are my thoughts on the proposed legislation regarding teachers and our education system:
1. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Trying to fix the problem with more testing is like a company who test markets a product and gets bad reviews. Instead of going back and changing the design to make it clearer, easier and more useful, the company just makes it bigger. This doesn’t work in the business world. Why would it work in education? Isn’t the point of education to prepare students to participate intelligently in society? Or is it to teach them how to take a multiple-choice test?
2. I find it disturbing that a legislature that pushes so hard for differentiated learning and teaching when it comes to what teachers do, feels that it somehow makes sense to throw that all out the door when it comes to evaluating our students. If a multiple-choice test is the be-all and end-all for showing what students know, where does that leave kinesthetic, musical or visual learners?
Some of my brightest students want to give up because they can’t pass the FCAT. Why can’t they use something like a comprehensive portfolio system where students collect representative works starting in eighth or ninth grade? In 12th grade, they have to go before a board and prove that they’ve shown growth and that they’ve applied what they’ve learned (for example, in math they could show how they used math to build something like a bridge that could support a certain amount of weight, which would tie in with science/physics). Maybe couple that with some kind of multiple-choice thing, but don’t make a test the only way of evaluating student knowledge. We don’t grade our politicians with how well they do at multiple-choice questions (Wouldn’t that be funny — to give them a multiple-choice test about some of the laws they’ve voted for?).
3. Politicians who have never taught for any measurable amount of time in a classroom making executive decisions about how education should be run is like teachers who have never worked in an industry making executive decisions about a Fortune 500 company. I’d like to see some of those politicians get placed in a classroom for a month or more without help and then they can discuss my pay and benefits and ability as a teacher.
4. What other industry bases its employees’ pay on the motivation of a bunch of teenagers? It’s like a customer service company paying its employees based on how many happy callers they get or how many angry callers they get. They can do the best that they can and still have an unhappy customer.
As teachers, most of us do the best that we can. Yet somehow we’re held responsible for all the variables in our students’ lives – their parent’s ability to parent, their financial situation, their current boyfriend/girlfriend situation and their interest in something that they often don’t see as relevant.
When did government (federal and state) stop acting by the people and for the people? When the voice of the people isn’t heard and the very people who work so hard are accused and punished, what incentive is there left to improve or try harder? Where will education be in a year or two if we allow legislation like this to pass unchallenged? If you think things are bad now...
Amanda Youngblood lives in Orlando, but works in the Osceola County School District.