Jon Schoening’s Educational Blog

In the educational arena today, educators are faced with the reality that their professional reputation and effectiveness as an educator will be measured by the gains that their students make on a standardized test. This is the direction that the pendulum has swung. The intent of these standardized tests is being misused to the detriment of students. Authentic teaching is being sacrificed to meet a political goal with a substandard measurement that attempts to lump all students into one category.

I am all for a movement that promotes teacher accountability, but this is not the way to do it. The standardized test should be a measure to identify areas that need improvement. This could mean curricular, possibly faculty, staff development, or areas that need more resources of training. Placing all the blame on a teacher using one test is a gross misuse of standardized test- a quick and dangerous pseudo solution to a serious problem.

The reflections and things that have been marinating in my mind since Gorki’s presentation on poverty and inequality have really hit home today. I received an email from a friend giving the details of SB 458 which has recently been passed by the Senate and is in the process of going through the Georgia House. It stipulates that students from a school system that has lost accreditation have to right to go to any school they wish including across county lines and private schools. The state will provide vouchers for the private schools and state money for the students that cross county lines. The state money only accounts for 48% of our budget. They are requiring accredited school systems to take on a serious burden of providing the other 52%.

We all know what school system is in danger of losing its accreditation. But why?  Clayton County, from what I hear, use to be a pretty good school system. What happened? What changed? An unequal distribution of resources? Low expectations? Bad leadership? How does a school system get off track so fast?

If we do not understand the problem, we can never figure out a solution. And so far the best solution our legislators have created is to allow families to cart their kids everyday across county lines to better performing schools and give those schools half the resources to educate that child. I hope this is not their only solution. Clayton County needs serious help. What can we do to help? We have all this new information and research in our heads. Let’s put it to use. I have been racking my brain all day, and I got nothing.

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.