A girl I have been working closely with keeps mentioning the name of an ESL teacher that she is also working with. This struck me as strange, since the girl is African American. She was born in the USA and so were here parents. English is her native language.
Today, I saw Ms. ESL and asked her how she happened to be working with Jen. Ms. ESL told me that she is on the Inquiry Committee and Jen is one of the students the committee is looking at. Ms. ESL wants to do more than look at data so she has been talking to Jen, looking at her work, and trying to come up with strategies to help her.
Ms. ESL told me that the Inquiry Committee is looking for ways to give these kids extra credits towards graduation. They are considering summer school, evening school and Saturday school. They are considering giving kids credit for eating lunch, taking the bus, getting 8 hours of sleep a night, knowing how to use a cell phone or an i-pod, etc, etc, etc. (Only kidding about the last sentence, but trying to make a point.) They are trying to do everything except get to the root of the problem.
Ms. ESL is a teacher. She wants to understand what Jen's problems are and help her fix them. She is tired of looking at data and coming to no helpful conclusions. Everyone knows the kids being studied are failing. No amount of data analysis is going to correct that.
Ms. ESL has come to the conclusion that Jen has some learning disabilities. She needs a very structured learning environment and she would benefit from smaller classes and more individual attention. Ms. ESL has discovered Jen's problem and a possible solution.
Principal Suit says there is no room in the building for small classes. He has no money in the budget for small classes. Interesting, he has a huge office for holding these meetings. He has extra money to pay people to be on Inquiry Committees. He has money for all these extra programs. He has NO RESOURCES to do anything constructive.
Another interesting thing about this Inquiry Committee is that there are no math teachers on it. More kids have trouble passing math than any other subject, but no math teachers are on the committee. This strikes me as ridiculous.
It is time to stop giving lip service to helping kids and really do something to help.
4 comments:
At least he has committees...faux ones, but still. Ours thinks he knows it all then consistently deals with the fallout instead of doing it right the first time. Funny how that keeps happening, yet he hasn't chosen to change anything.....
Maybe your IQ falls automatically when you get the big comfy office??
All schools, I believe, have such a team and the positions should have been posted so teachers could apply.
Schoolgal
Are you volunteering?
I would volunteer if I could make a difference.
Looking for credits to push kids ahead is not my idea of doing anything worthwhile. Until the goals of the committee are changed, I think I will pass on the volunteering.
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