Reply to Poll for Teachers. Your top 5 reasons for metro D.C poor performing schools.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]A few random thoughts. I am an ESOL teacher and work in a school with a high FARMS rate.

1. Pre-K is great for getting kids used to being in school. That is helpful, as when they get to K they don't have to take the time to learn how to stand in a line, sit on the carpet etc. And, yes, they do have to learn those things. Real instruction begins the first week of school, and if students do not know how to behave in a school setting then their energy goes to learning how to do that, not the academic concepts being taught.

That being said, Pre-K cannot cure everything. I just assessed all of our K students (not just ESOL) on their ability to write their name, ID shapes, colors, numbers to 31, letters and letter sounds. Many of the students who had a year of Pre-K still knew very few of these concepts. Reinforcement at home is key, and it doesn't happen in many families. What we're finding is that many parents don't really engage in much vocabulary-rich conversation with their kids. And by vocabulary-rich at this age, I mean things like talking about the colors of the food they're eating or that the TV is shaped like a rectangle.

2. This kind of goes along with my last point, but many people lump ELL students into one pile. There is a huge difference between kids who come to school with little or no English but have a very good grasp of their native language. Those students will need some time to learn the language, but the foundation is there. It's a lot easier to learn vocabulary and concepts in English when you already have the background knowledge even though it's in a different language. It's called positive transfer. These students make progress very quickly and catch up to grade level after a year or two. These types of students are pretty rare in my school, but we do have a few who are like this.

Then there are the students who were born in the US, can speak and understand English just fine, but come to school with extremely limited background knowledge. They come to Pre-K or K at 4 or 5 with very little vocabulary. They need to learn from the ground up. The curriculum (at least in my district) assumes that students have a certain amount of background knowledge from which to draw, but they just don't. So then content becomes more and more in depth and students fall farther and farther behind. Like 4th graders who are learning about different types of government, but don't know what a city, state, country or continent is and think that Barack Obama is the president of the whole world. This happens with ELLs and also students who don't speak or understand any language other than English.

My friend teaches in a school with an affluent population. We teach the same curriculum, but her students have such a large amount of background knowledge and experiences from which to draw. She may need to fill in a few gaps here and there, but at my school we're pretty much filling in gaps so much that the purpose of the unit ends up being lost. But if we try to restructure the unit so that kids will understand and actually get something out of it we get in trouble for not following the curriculum to the letter.

3. Teachers are pulled in way too many directions. Class sizes are large, considerable behavior problems are expected to be handled in class by the teacher, special ed. instruction and accommodations must be given by the teacher with little support, and there can be up to 6 reading groups in a class. It's just very difficult to have the time to give each student exactly what they need. Every lesson needs so much differentiation, and planning time is taken up by meetings, meetings and more meetings. Teachers at my school have 1 individual planning time per week. The rest is long-range common planning and data chats. Students who are below grade level must be receiving interventions and those interventions must be documented. If a student does not respond to interventions after a certain period of time a building-wide meeting with the parent is called. Often times the parent does not show up even though they said they would be there the day before. After a certain point, the process is stalled without any parent cooperation and students who may have some level of learning disability don't receive the help they need.

Teachers and schools keep being asked to do more and more. The teachers I work with are very dedicated to their students and want the best for them. But they are staying at school until 8pm and forgoing time with their own families in order to get everything done. There is strong pressure from administration in my school to sponsor after school clubs since our students don't get many extracurricular opportunities. There is no stipend money for these clubs, so teachers are expected to volunteer their time. We are also asked to sign up for slots during the summer to come in and serve lunch since our school qualifies for the summer lunch program but there isn't staff provided with the program. Teachers by nature are usually pretty generous people, but at some point enough is enough. The lines have blurred between teacher and caregiver.

These thoughts aren't in any particular order since I just wrote stream of consciousness style. Maybe I'll be back to give a more concise response and actually list top 5 reasons.

[/quote]

I am the teacher who posted previously and I also teach ESOL.  I agree with everything you wrote especially about how we are expected to do more and more of what I consider the role of a parent.  I went to my kid's BTS night and it was packed.  Standing room only.  I'm exhausted and yet I went to BTS night b/c I care and want to know about my child's teachers, curriculum, etc.  My school's BTS night often has entire grade level teams (3 classrooms) where not one parent attends.  90%+ of the students who attend my school live within walking distance.  When I leave BTS night, I see parents sitting on stoops and sitting out in front yards.  If you can't spend an hour walking down the street to your child's school once a year, what does that say to your child?[/quote]

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