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It is mutual noesis that all traditionalisti teacher certification programs at major universities are cautiously designed only to prepare fabricating classroom educators to with great success instruct their chosen disciplines (English, mathematics, history, government, physics, Spanish, German, etc), acquired through successful completion of undergrad and/or graduate degree curriculums, to public school students. Along the same line, most state public school districts hire only certified teachers as classroom educators to prepare and present cogent promotional disciplinary subject lessons to middle school and high school students, and the fundamental principle of reading, writing, English grammar, and mathematics to elementary school students. As a usual teacher education curriculum requirement, the course of study, “psychology of adolescence,” is, usually, the only one-of-its-kind required of all formulating secondary-school teachers at most universities and colleges. This peculiar psychology course is intended to acquaint student teachers, planning to instruct middle school and high school students, with the normal patterns of maturation and development in children thirteen-years-and-up in age. Elementary school student teachers are commonly required to take other psychology courses dealing with pre-adolescent development. Parenting classes are, however, not traditionally required of student teachers in mandated teacher education programs. If they were, and college students contemplating instructing careers realized that their future classroom duties would partly include a broader not only instructing students academic skills, but, also, basic socialization accomplishments traditionally taught to children by parents at home (ultimately necessary for the basic didactic procedure to take place in a classroom setting), there would surely be a dearth of student teachers in university corroboration programs. For such parenting classes to subsist in preparatory teacher education curriculums would be a blatant admittance by American society that most public school parents are not doing their jobs of preparing their children for classroom learning. As for the D.C. Public Schools, there are presently rather a few certified educators who are splendid teachers of their respective disciplines, but poor surrogate parents. This is because they weren’t trained by their universities, and hired by the District, to be parents, but, rather, teachers. These professional educators were not expecting to find three-out-of-five elementary, middle, and high school students, in DC, to be conduct problems. They weren’t expecting to find the majority of kids in their classes unprepared for public school, children who don’t have parents or guardians who genuinely want to instruct them vitally basic socialization skills, attainments necessitated for an atmosphere of respect and courtesy to preside in a classroom. Certainly, if D.C. elementary school children enter the introductory grade behaviorally and socially unprepared to receive classroom instruction, and, thereafter, are the recipients of continual negligable parenting at home, only one sad result in learning will take place under the current system. These behaviorally dysfunctional, and unteachable, elementary students will, for the sake of political expediency, will be indulged and passed-on by most of their teachers to the next higher grade, and the next, without ever learning the rudiments of a sound education, until they are in high school unsocialized, and unable to read, write, and carry out math at their respective grade-levels. What happens in most cases, in the classrooms of teachers readily conforming to the expected values of school principals (who are more concerned with the number of students certified as passing from one grade to the next, than with whether those students have genuinely met the academic standards for promotion) is an adverse toleration of unsocialized disruptive students that persistently make academic instruction and learning very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. You see, it doesn’t presently reflect well on school administrations when 30-to-50 percent of their students are considered failures in Math, English, and reading classes. Ironically, the persistently resiliant DC classroom teachers, the ones who have refused to tolerate the attrocious behavings of poorly prepared, recalcitrant students, and to pass them on to the next higher grade when they’ve failed to achieve passing marks, are those who have been unjustly censured by their school principals, and the central DC administration, for earnestly endeavoring, but failing to educate these chronically incorrigible preadolescent and adolescent children. After bending over backwards to help these children learn, these teachers have been terribly villified for refusing to mollycoddle them and to certify that they were suitable for promotion, when they weren’t. Teachers must not be made responsible for the negative and hostile complex mental states that accompany public school children from their homes into the classroom, and they will have to not be required to spend their valuable time indulging the anti-social behavings of such students. Parents, instead, must be kept responsible, under law, for the prevailing negative complex mental states of their children, and the classroom behavings these poor complex mental states generate. Yet, in August 2008, seventy-five certified D.C. teachers were dismissed by D.C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee for conduct she considered unbecoming of public school teachers. This conduct ranged from skipping required meetings and violating protocols with principals, to sending mass emails rebuking supervisors to entire school staffs. Some of these teachers were also accused of poor classroom management skills, being AWOL from school, not following or having lesson plans, ignoring suggestions for improvement, rude and aggressive demeanor, doing not one thing to improve high student failure rate, and other behavior-based charges. Now, I may not recognise any of those teachers personally, but I have taught in a assortment of public school settings, inner-urban, suburban, and rural, and know two very primary ordinary characteristics regarding most principals and assistant principals. Just like most federal and state judges are mediocre attorneys who could not entirely succeed in the private-sector, most principals and assistant principals are mediocre teachers who couldn’t to the full or entire extent succeed in the classroom. Most of them knew, however, how to play politics well sufficient at the district-level to get chosen for those lucretive administrative positions (much higher in salary than regular classroom teachers), and when they land the jobs, they take their classroom inadaquacies with them. The real heroes of the American public schools are, on the other hand, those persistent, highly qualified classroom teachers who spend long hours preparing and delivering magnificent subject lessons, who adamantly refuse to receive intolerable behavings from their students, and set obtainable behavioral and academic standards in their classes, which they with resolute determination enforce. The majority of the secondary school principals, assistant principals, and coaches that I have known, over the years (in Texas and Washington State) who have sidelined their important administrative and athletic duties with academic instruction, have, in most cases, been exceedingly popular with most of their students because of their less-than-demanding instructional classroom requirements. One peculiar baseball coach, who likewise taught senior American government in a small, but affluent, East Texas high school, was very general for his tradition of often times writing throughout the curriculum in a majority of his classes, in order to appease what he called the beastly conduct of seniors. On assorted occasions, when his government classes were supposedly involved with studying the signification of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, galore of his athletes (who were also his students) were experiencing bad Mondays because they had lost football games the former Fridays. So, for his Monday lessons on the American Constitution, this coach wrote all over the curriculum and assigned 45 minute essays for all of his students. On the blackboard he wrote, “Tell me, in a 2 page composition, how you would feel if you were an old, worn-out tennis shoe. You may leave and go to the cafeteria when you finish.” This coach told me privily that he always made sure that all of his government students receive a B-or-above grade if they just show-up to class and are basically respectful. There was one other government teacher at this Texas high school who demanded much more from her students than did this standard coach. While the bachelor’s degree-level coach always had an enrollment of 30-or-more seniors in his four government classes, the other teacher (who likewise taught history, economics, and geography, and held a master’s degree in political science) had less than 25 students in each of her government classes, and a failure rate of 15 percent-per-class. No wonder the majority of the school’s seniors asked to be scheduled for the classes taught by the coach. Of course, the foregoing example, hardly stereotypical, is of a small, comparatively obscure, rural school system that graduates around 250 seniors each year. Yet, most principals and assistant principals, in almost each school district, both independent and dependent, big and small, in each U.S. state are fundamentally the same, in that their frequent expected values for classroom teachers are focalized more toward statistical feeling of satisfaction of federal necessaries for high-dollar funding than toward the feeling of satisfaction of the students’ academic learning requirements. The learning assessment-by-examination trend that has become ordinary in most states, since 1980, through the application of federal funding guidelines, has catered to a significant decline in academic standards, in particular in elementary schools. This is because the classroom teachers are routinely required to spend more classroom time preparing their students for standardized assessment examinations than instructing curriculum subject content. So, when you add the amount of class-time expended by educators parenting their students, instructing them basic socialization accomplishments (and for the frequent disciplining of stubbornly obstinate students) to the time required for instructing them to pass assessment tests, not much is left of a 50-minute class period. Such a waste of class-time has been an ongoing dilemma in a good deal of public school districts around the nation. Getting back to the teachers who were fired, in 2008, by former-DC School Chancellor Michelle Rhee, but not long back reinstated in their jobs by order of a wise DC arbitrator, I came upon in my own investigation of the primary terminations that 65 of the 75 teachers dismissed by Rhee hold master’s degrees and have more than 10 years classroom instructing experience. What I also gleaned from my exploration is that the combined particular education population of all the DC Public Schools has proliferated principally since 1990, almost 80%, when federal funding for particular education students rose to a high-dollar level. What does this have to do with the prevailing issue? Well, for over 20 years, the simple requirements for labelling badly rebellious children, who have no real parents and are, mere, attitude problems, as special education students have permitted the DC Public Schools to place in each of it is regular education classes a high share of students classified in the particular education category. While one special education student will yield closely twice the federal and state cash that two regular students will commonly demand, it is rather easy to see why school principals work overtime to see that rebellious and disruptive students, with persistent attitude problems, are routinely classified within a special education category for the behaviorally impaired/disordered. This routine ensures that the classroom teachers forced to deal with these misclassified problem students will have to concede them to stay in their classes, as obstacles to classroom effectiveness, disregarding of their behaviors. For the teachers who realize that these students have been misclassified, and are deliberately using their particular education label as license to disrupt the proper implementation of lesson plans, feeling of annoyance at being hindered or criticized is surely rife. Add this salient element to the detriments attached to the instructing of assessment tests and socialization skills, rather of course curriculum, to a majority of DC students, and one may see why exemplary DC teachers might rebel versus the scheme enforced upon them. While I ran into that Michelle Rhee called most of the teachers she fired dinosaurs, reluctant to follow the DC Schools’ prescribed administrative program, her actions as Chancellor fell in line with the DC Council approved declaration that “DC mothers and fathers must realize that they are intended to work while the DC Public Schools parents their children.” This declaration was likewise made in Nazi Germany, in 1936, by the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. “The Nazi State will ascertain that it is children are raised, while the men and women of Germany are only expected to work and keep the Reich strong.” The reasonable person, on reading this essay, will probably derive five very basic determinations from my making something publicly available of the facts: 1) That, due to parents not more than willing to parent and classroom teachers not being permitted to instruct because of a prevalence of unsocialized and disruptive students in their classes, the DC Public Schools have been going down-hill for rather a long time in their basic mission of efficaciously instructing the rudiments of learning to DC youth, 2) That the current prevailing system of permitting DC mothers, fathers, and guardians to neglect their natural parenting duties with impunity is only going to exacerbate the current ills of the DC Public Schools, 3) That the power of corporeal punishment, the paddle, must be restored to the classroom teacher, and that students with persistently disruptive attitude difficulties will have to not be permitted to stay in classes depriving those few students, who desire to learn, of a nuturing learning environment, 4) That teachers are to be given free sovereignty in their classes to instruct only curriculum course content to their students (not socialization accomplishments and how to take tests), and that the learning assessment of each student will have to be based totally upon class performance (cumulative each day grades, tests, recitations, and other grading tools designed by each classroom teacher), and 5) That only organically impaired students with authenti learning deficits be labeled under the category of particular education for instructional purposes. Those students with attitude troubles must be corrected with resolute determination with proper discipline. That these foregoing determinations will be integrated into an betterment plan for the DC Public Schools is my fervid hope. |
