As the
pressure on schools’ performance is intensifying, educators are struggling to
find the winning combination that will turn their school a success over night…
Schools are
trying all kind of tricks to make it happen. Whatever the new criteria for
‘success’ will be, now that standardized testing is fading from the educational
landscape, a new, brilliant, idea eventually will redefine a success …
As a
substitute teacher, I visit many schools, and have seen the changes over the years.
The most dramatic modification is usually at middle schools, as they go from
bad to good, or vice versa, by merely hiring (or dismissing) discipline dean…
High schools
are more complicated and their ‘success’ is determined by a combination of
measures.
However, no matter what the definition of a good school is, its
implication is vast on students, school reputation, neighborhood desirability,
but also on the career path of teachers and administrators.
I have
worked at a school that had every desirable element: Good teachers, good
programs, vocational subjects and a group of dedicated administrators,
including a principal who worked tirelessly toward achieving suitable academic
performance. There was one thing, however, that stood in the way of success,
the student body. Had you transformed this institution to an affluent
neighborhood, the results would have been unquestionable, but at that neighborhood
no matter how hard the faculty worked, pace of improvement was not fast enough
for the education ‘police’…
Few years
into the internal effort to turn things around, and despite the fact that there
was improvement (even if slow), the city took over, replaced the principal, administrators
and staff, and a major revolution had started… within one year none of the
previous top faculty had remained. Outside educational ‘specialists’ were
brought in, and the few teachers who stayed were put under a tight scrutiny of
the new education elite… Another sign of severe change was the bell schedule…
I see my
past colleagues, those who were not driven to early retirement, in every school
I work now. They were dispersed all over the district, and they all share the
same sadness of a community broken up. The principal who was never given
another chance at a different school got a position at the district
headquarters, and not long afterwards had retired, feeling, probably, a complete
failure…
And the
school? I was called to replace a teacher that I know. At first sight I was quite
impressed, smaller class size, clean and polished floor, new seating
arrangement and well enough behaved students. My thought was, well, things have
improved. Maybe all those changes were made for the best after all…
It took me
two more visits to the same classroom, and an additional visit to another
classroom, to realize that nothing had changed… Teachers are still good and
dedicated, students are still lazy, with bad attitude and proud ignorance… I
realized that when I tried to teach and found out the gap between
the attempted level and the real knowledge. Of course I could have blamed the
teachers, but I know better, I have been at that school, had the same students,
in the same failing education system, and I had the same level of frustration…
And then,
there are those schools that don’t worry that much about improvement. They do have a
body of students who come from an affluent neighborhood, and they can count on
their success to pull school’s scores higher. Yes, they do have the other type
of students too, the ones that don’t perform, and they try their best to help
them, but they don’t lose sleep over it. The good students are their buffer.
These schools don’t displace teachers, shift their assignments, or change bell
schedule. They let teachers stay to full retirement age and beyond. They know
that unmotivated, unprepared, student body is a fact of a public school life,
and they count on the other segment of population to balance out the ‘success’
measure, whatever the current measure is...
