Tuesday, October 11, 2011

New Job/Same Job

My family and I just completed a cross-country move to the Eastern Seaboard where I've just landed a new job as a special education teacher in a high-need urban high school. I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, I'm happy to be back in the swing. I love working with underprivileged kids and there are fewer things more rewarding than knowing you've made a difference in the life of a young person who may have few positive influences in his life. They deserve all the support we can give them.

On the other hand, the school has been underperforming - or so say the benchmark tests - and there are all sorts of silly and pointless regulations we have to follow in the name of "accountability." Most of all, based only on the school tour and interview I had last week, I can already tell that test scores are the top priority, as established by the district higher-ups and evidenced by the scripted, canned curriculum we're apparently supposed to follow. It's this sort of crap that drives me nuts about what should be, what used to be, the most noble profession on Earth.

Still, perhaps this is an opportunity to effect change from within. How, exactly? ...I don't know. I do know this: education and test prep are each other's blood enemies.

Education creates flexible minds and psyches capable of dealing with the issues we'll face 20, 50, 80 years from now. Test prep teaches kids to bubble inside the lines.

Education provides the foundation for future learning and professional success. Test prep teaches kids that there's always, and only, one right answer to every question.

Education gives students the knowledge and confidence to ask, "why?" and "why not?" Test prep teaches you that the answer to both questions is "because I said so."

Education makes long-term research papers possible, allowing students to expand their intellectual horizons and pursue in depth a topic that interests them. Test prep is short-term, geared toward a specific exam that has no bearing on either the student's future learning or that young person's post-graduation life.

Education makes us smart. Test prep makes us stupid.

And yet, for all that, I've just signed on to help a school boost its test scores.

Like I said, I have mixed feelings about this. I know there's a lot of good I can do at this school and for the students I will have. And I'm really looking forward to meeting them.

And yet... and yet...

Our national obsession with test prep is educational malpractice, short-sighted at best, criminal at worst. The next Steve Jobs won't emerge because of it; if the creativity and passion aren't tested out of him, he'll emerge despite it. We're hobbling America's future economic standing in a pathetic attempt to appease people who call themselves reformers, who are in fact little more than hogs gorging at the taxpayer trough.

And worst of all, the testing mandate rests its corpulent backside most heavily on children in poverty. It's as if we've already given up on them, choosing to drill them in discipline and testing rather than offering the hope of a brighter future where they might actually be the ones asking questions at a job interview instead of answering them.

I worked in a high-poverty school right before we moved to our new state and the emphasis was on teaching students compliance before coursework. In some cases, this was sadly necessary but we inflicted this obedience first/teaching second philosophy on every child in the building. There was no way I'd send my kid to such a school. I'd homeschool first.

I hope this new school is different. I hope the regulations we must follow don't cross the line from onerous to asinine. I hope I actually get to teach. I'm afraid, though, that the testing mandates and scripted curriculum may get in the way of providing an education to the kids who need it most.

We shall see.

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