“Affective development is more important to young adolescents at this stage of development.” Meaning: the administration believes that middle schoolers are too screwed up emotionally to actually be expected to learn anything, so teachers may not hold students to any standards.

“Self- esteem is vitally important, and must be the focus of the educational program.” Meaning: give every kid a reward for breathing, or tying their shoes, and they will then feel good about themselves and then miraculously be interested in doing the hard work of crafting an education.

“Teachers must differentiate instruction for every one of their 27 children in their heterogeneous classroom in a 44 minute period.” Meaning: plunk kids down in front of meaningless exercises and role playing as one scurries around the room trying to spend at most 1.5 minutes with each student, to very little effect. Multiply this by six classes a day, and the teacher must have an individual plan for over 180 students per day. IQ ranges could span 70 points in a single classroom, and yet there was still only that 1.5 minutes IF the teacher did no instruction. And if some students were disrupting the education of the majority of the room, their right to be there TRUMPED the right of those who wanted to learn, and their parents KNEW THEIR RIGHTS to have the school provide free babysitting for eight hours a day, and by G-d, they would get a LAWYER or an IEP– hey that’s cheaper!– if that school kept messing with their right to have that day care by suspending their kids.

“Retention increases the chances that a student will drop out exponentially. Therefore, no students will be retained, no matter how abysmal their grades.” Meaning: Kids can do absolutely nothing but be given meaningless self-esteem awards for three long years. And about that so-called “study”–Really? So does being advanced to 9th grade with a fourth grade reading level because the student has done absolutely nothing in the way of learning in three years. I wonder what would happen if we did a study of how successful students were who had been socially promoted to high school? They may not drop out as early, but just because one’s body occupies a space in a classroom (or, more likely, a school hallway while ditching class) does not mean that you are being any more educationally productive than if you had dropped out. The assumption that if someone hasn’t dropped out, they are learning is obviously untrue from the fact that this discussion started by mandating that kids who are already here but failing can’t be held accountable for their lack of educational achievement.

Teachers were also made aware that they alone were responsible for whether their students learned, and that excused especially the students themselves from the equation.

Middle school is three years of waste. Get rid of all of them. They are the rotting core of the educational system.

Can some smart people please write about what research exists about avoiding burnout without going indifferent?

I am moved by your stark and honest account of your year teaching “intervention.”

I wonder what you think might have made your experience less horrible.

You mentioned a lack of administrative support. What might they have done for you?

Obviously more parental support could have made a world of difference but assuming that remains out of our control, what can we do?

On the other hand, teachers are players and part of the problem.

Allen,

I agree with everything you say except that education is born of politics. It was not always so. Public schooling has mucked the entire works.

Summer school is free in my state (district’s offer summer classes at their option) for both remediation and enrichment.

Are you suggesting that we have no public funding of education at all?

The problem is we have a politicized system…

It isn’t politicized, it’s political. The system is born of the political process and never escapes its roots. Participants know reflexively that the power to set the terms of the compromises that are part of any political process are a function of political clout. The more power you’ve got the more you get what you want and the more the system serves your interests at the expense of the other participants.

The reason it takes exceptional courage to insist that kids learn is because from the point of view of other players, some parents, some administrators, that’s an unreasonable attitude. Kids go to school because they have to and to the extent there’s a purpose to attendance it is the acquisition of a diploma. If that’s what’s important then exerting any excess effort to acquire the diploma is foolish and anyone who insists that excess effort be expended is being unreasonable.

How do we put an end to this nonsense? That’s easy. If you want to take the politics out of education then take the education out of politics. If the problems arise from the political nature of public education then you won’t solve those problems by looking to the political system. That’s the source of the problems and the solution will require great, big brass ones.

One of the effects of holding schools accountable for graduation rates is that schools and schools systems now have an incentive to make making up credits as easy on the kid as the system can. Every student needs to pass all the required classes in four years, and if he or she doesn’t, the school and district look bad. The kid can keep taking the classes over and over again at no cost to him until he or she is 21 in many states.

I’m in a fairly affluent district, and even we’ve created a free evening school remediation program for students who fail a couple of core classes. The kids are held to a slightly more rigorous standard of classroom behavior and can be kicked out of the program pretty easily compared to regular school. Academically, however, the standards are much lower. For example, while our district has defined standards for required reading, writing, and research papers in English classes, the grade in the make up program is based only on the very easy, multiple choice final exam. Many students would have passed the regular class if the grade has been based solely on the such an final exam, but they failed to complete the required work in an acceptable manner. So with the evening program, we give them a free second chance and we lower the standards! My tax dollars at work! (Working for the district intensifies my outrage in this and many other cases.)

I think retaining students who haven’t mastered the academic content is basic. Unfortunately, actually having a district implementing this as its basic philosophy would be revolutionary. Currently, in most schools and systems, all the pressure is on the teacher to give out passing grades. It’s much harder to retain a student who hasn’t learned the content than it is to pass such a student along. If the system is gamed in such a manner, what outcome do you expect? Sure, you can lay it all on the teachers for being spineless, but if you can’t rely on any support from above if the grade is contested by the parents, how would you maintain your standards? Despite what many believe about tenure, you can still get fired for insubordination and some states don’t have protections for teachers who refuse to change a grade. (My state gave teachers the right to refuse to change grades, but it affirmed the administrative authority to changed the grades without the teachers’ agreement. I suppose I can take comfort should a situation like this ever occur with me personally that at least I personally didn’t certify the kid as competent.)

Intervention Teacher,

Thank you for your work. One year is more that most people would have given. I hope you don’t leave teaching all together.

I have one question about what you posted: I had assumed that scripted teaching would require little to no prep time. (You’d still have grading of course, but I would have thought little advance preparation.) When you said it took hours, what was so time consuming?