Reply to I feel like MCPS sucks the joy out of teaching

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Here’s a reason why I felt my joy sucked out today. One of our School Improvement Plan goals — which means a goal that all of our individual teams need to support — is for more Hispanic kids to come to school more often (yes, it specifies Hispanic). So, we are evaluating ourselves on whether parents send their kids to school. Yes, the school has a role in communicating to parents that school is important. But us teachers? If only we were more entertaining, they would come, I guess?

[/quote]

We were told during pre-service our top priority goal this year was to halve the number of office referrals for black males (I teach at a majority black Title 1 MoCo Elem school).

The result so far? Teachers are HIGHLY discouraged to write office referrals! The same out of control behaviors that were present last year are back this year (fighting, throwing materials across the room, cussing out teacher) but instead of going to the office, they now just stay in the classroom! The behaviors have gotten more extreme and there has been an increase in other students starting to mimic the bad behaviors. (And yes I have developed relationships with the students and have good classroom management - this is the first year I truly dread going to work every day.)[/quote]

This is what is broken about MCPS. They take a metric and try to manipulate the metric, rather than attempting to get at the root-cause of what's behind the metric.

This just causes more harm to the very same group they claim to be helping, as you point out. The behavior doesn't change. It just goes unreported or ignored to make the metric artificially look like it's going down.[/quote]

Exactly this. And it’s because the root cause is not acceptable to say: children are not blank slates when they come to us at 5, or even at 4. Test scores and behaviors will not be the same between Student A who has been going to preschool and reading books and learning colors and numbers with his parents, and Student B who has been sitting alone on his iPad with an older sibling all day and has never heard English before. We will never reach equality here. Sure, teachers can work miracles if there are some of the Student B’s in their classes. But not if a majority are.[/quote]

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