Silencing Teachers in an Era of Scripted Reading
P.T. Barnum said it best when he said, “There is a sucker born every minute.” Yes, schools with poverty tend to struggle in reading, but if you are an administrator and you think some carnival salesman offering you a script is the silver bullet you need, then you need more help than the struggling students in your school. We need creativity and an open forum to bring change, not restriction and regression. The best thing an administrator could do is hire serious professionals, seek their counsel on burning issues, create a platform for open and honest dialog, and then based on the staffs decisions or discussions, do whatever is in your power to make that happen. The decisions being made by the individual school for the individual school. “An educator’s ability to make decisions is absolutely necessary to his or her educational work. It is by demonstrating an ability to make decisions that an educator teaches the difficult virtue of decisiveness,” (Friere, 78).
Note to principal: Don’t trust some salesperson working on commission to have more of an influence on your decision than your entire staff of highly trained, experienced professionals whom know your students better than you ever will. If a staff is not allowed to be a part of the decision making process, an atmosphere of friction and entropy will set in and grind away at a schools foundation and grind away at any respect that a staff has for their administration or policy makers.
If there is nothing wrong with your staff and the only thing wrong with your students is the fact that many live in poverty, then only two things could possibly be wrong. It is either a problem with the program or the administration. How many administrators do you know who would put all the blame of a failing school on their shoulders? None, because the administrator with that mind set turns a school around and leads it out of darkness.
February 7th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Hey Jon! I agree with your statement about “the need for creativity and an open forum, not restriction and regression.” Teachers also need the freedom to make decisions we see fit for our students. On one hand, I sometimes feel sorry for the local administrators of low performing schools because the are scrambling to find some type of reform model to get their scores up. What I think is missing is they are not looking closely at the real research. They are listening to the “carvinal salesmen” (that was funny) who give them biased research information. I know they have a million other things on their plate, but they have to stop, cross reference what they are being told and then ask the critical question…Is this what’s best for our students in our school? Then there are other administrators who are not given a choice about which model they think will work for the students, it’s dictated by the district. What would you do in that situation in you were the administrator? I have an idea…quit and become a lobbyist.