Dallas Alliance AFT held a press conference on Friday morning to discuss the union's dissatisfaction with the way House Bill 1 reconstitutes schools.
Of course, a lot of blame was thrown around: the kids who don't care; the parents who don't get involved; the Legislature that won't fix it; and Craddick Craddick Craddick.
Craddick is a way, I think of saying that the current Republican administration has one thought: Public schools are bad, and the only way to fix them is vouchers.
And I guess I could stp right there. If I only say those two things, you'd figure I'm about to write one more rehash about how No Child Left Behind is bad. Or good.
Aimee Bolender describes the sanctions under HB 1 as "backdoor vouchers." It's just one more way to strip schools from the public school system without guaranteeing solutions.
That's not what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about being a teacher, about the fact you go into the classroom every day with the knowledge you have of your subject, but you may not be teaching that subject in a way that reaches your students. So you change your approach, or you try a new experience or you reach down and try to pull something out of your students.
Most of the time it works. Sometimes it doesn't. You don't have the answer for that one student who simply doesn't grasp what you're trying to teach him.
I think this is one of the failures of NCLB. We've created a law. It's worked with a certain number of students. But there are still so many children out there who do not benefit from the current accountability system. Still, Secretary Spellings attempts to cram the subject down our throats -- that this system in this particular form has made a difference and does work.
And if there a problem, Urban School, it's your fault. You didn't try hard enough.
Now I'm not going to give teachers or schools a cop out here. I'm not satisfied with throwing up our hands and giving up. But doesn't it seem odd to you that even though the gap is narrowing, we're still a graduation rate that is somewhere around 65 percent? If this worked so well, if we reached so many kids, wouldn't we be graduating more of them, and wouldn't more of them be prepared for post-secondary education.
So why aren't these Republican business types a little bit more like teachers? Why don't they look for fresh solutions or something different or a new method or actual change? If they believe in data, why aren't they using it to shape education policy?
I sit in The Council meetings, and I hear that we really don't have good research on what turns around high school dropouts. If that's the case, why don't we devote more of our time and research and effort to finding those answers? If we really believe that every child should achieve, would we stop at anything to find those answers, apply that research, devote our money and time and effort to do everything possible to graduate those students?
For instance, if we really and truly believe teacher quality made a difference, wouldn't we be devoting a whole bunch of resources to professional development? Wouldn't we be fixated on teacher preparation? Would we be sitting in the State Board of Educator Certification, arguing about how little training we need to require in alternative certification programs?
Sometimes I wonder if we don't do it because we really don't think it can be done. And if we really thought it could be done, we'd be doing it. And that applies just as much to the top of the food chain as it does to the individual teacher in the classroom.
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