I am writing to share my views about the troubling trends currently impacting public education in our country.
Teaching is a second career for me. This is my third year as a grade five classroom teacher, but I have been working in the Barnstable Public Schools since 2001 as a teacher assistant, substitute, and tutor. While guiding my own three children from elementary school through college, I returned to graduate school myself, received a Masters degree in Elementary Education, and became certified to teach grades 1-6.
I love working with fifth graders and I love my job, but I am becoming increasingly discouraged by the disrespectful manner in which teachers are being portrayed by the media, government bureaucrats, and business people.
I work long hours each and every day and contribute my own money to provide superior, caring, differentiated assistance to all of my students. There are not enough hours in the day to accomplish everything that I would like toward this end. I am at school from 7:30 to 4:30 and take work home at night and on weekends. Funding for public education is under fire and resources are dwindling, yet licensure demands, professional development requirements, and senseless mandates continue to multiply. These well-meaning but unrealistic intrusions make it increasingly difficult for teachers to perform the work we consider most important—planning lessons and instructing students.
“Not enough time” is a common lament in every business. The distinction in the teaching profession, however, is that every extra minute of work translates into services that contribute to the well-being of a living, breathing, human child, not simply to hours of productivity or an addition to the corporate bottom line. Contrary to the current mindset about teaching, the majority of teachers enter the field hoping to make a difference in the lives of their students and to provide a service to their community, not with the aspiration of becoming “rotten apples” in a declining system as has been suggested in Time magazine.
Even in a lovely area such as Cape Cod Massachusetts there is a great diversity among my students, and many significant social issues affect their daily lives. My students come from a variety of cultures, family backgrounds, socioeconomic groups, and ability levels. Their individual needs are as varied and unique as each of them. What they have in common is the fact that they are ten and eleven year olds who all deserve equal opportunities to work toward and reach their potential by receiving a quality education.
But, public education is much more than just academics. Nurturing a love of learning, developing a culture of respect and cooperation, and recognizing and accepting diversity and adversity are the cornerstones of an effective educational environment. In order to be successful academically, children require other supports including social, physical, and developmental. I believe the bureaucrats and executives responsible for the “Common Core” standards have lost sight of this crucial factor.
The most fulfilling part of my job is helping individual students recognize and embrace their own strengths and challenges—encouraging them to work hard, persevere and take pride in their performance. Cheering them on through their triumphs and their struggles and supporting their development into productive, competent citizens, I stress that education equals empowerment. Knowledge strengthens character, builds confidence, promotes opportunity, and broadens horizons. It is unrealistic and damaging to perpetuate the fallacy that all students should achieve proficiency in multiple academic subjects in order to be successful, especially when success is measured on a developmentally inappropriate standardized test.
Massachusetts has always displayed a strong commitment to providing its students with a quality education and has a reputation as a progressive, pro-education state. The Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks were crafted a decade ago to create structure and consistency around a field that is difficult to quantify. They are not perfect, but they are more realistic than the current Common Core which fails to recognize the developmental and circumstantial conditions that impact children’s learning.
Please think carefully about the underlying objectives of your efforts to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) or No Child Left Behind (NCLB). America’s public schools deserve support and cooperation from lawmakers, not to be penalized for the effects of societal issues beyond our control.
Private schools will always prosper and provide for the education of the wealthy and well-connected. Our public schools are one of the last vestiges of hope for the disenfranchised and hard-working middle class whose children comprise the vast majority of our country’s future citizens. Please make sure your decisions regarding ESEA and NCLB will shift the focus back to student learning and opportunity, and away from testing, labeling, and punishing schools.
—Bonnie Schulman
