tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3410387772840321888.post7921809020301368761..comments2023-10-03T11:28:42.397-04:00Comments on Badass Teachers Association Blog: Charter Schools: The Walmarts of EducationBadassTeacher Associationhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06249079678877556839noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3410387772840321888.post-23964412467887932002013-08-08T10:19:48.095-04:002013-08-08T10:19:48.095-04:00Part 2 of 2:
Most of the disagreements I had with...Part 2 of 2:<br /><br />Most of the disagreements I had with the administrators of the school had to do with "time on task". The school's policy was that students should walk into a classroom and start working immediately. During every minute from bell to bell, the students were expected to be working or listening quietly and taking notes. If I spent a few minutes greeting the students, letting them settle in, and checking in with them, these were seen as time lost. I was criticized for losing three minutes at the beginning of class--because this would add up to an entire class period over the course of a month. Never mind the reality that students can only learn so much at a time before they need to take a mental break from it, work some practice problems at home, and check in. While one additional class period would have been useful, the students were not going to learn an extra class period worth of content in three extra minutes a day. My curriculum is separated into discrete segments, and it would not make sense and would have confused the students to move the boundaries just because I had a few extra minutes.<br /><br />The other "time on task" issue the administration had was with experiments and activities. I teach as much as possible using inquiry-based methods. Inquiry is messy. Students don't necessarily know what they're learning while they're discovering it, and there can be a lot of apparent "down time" while the students are processing what they have learned. This was seen by administrators as students being "off task".<br /><br />By the end of the year, the administrators and I agreed that the school was not a good fit for me. I had gone into the year with an open mind, and prepared to like the idea of charter schools. I tried everything I could to make the format and the school work for my students, but the reality was that every time I tried something that would be considered "good teaching" (in most academic circles), I was told "you can't do that here." Every time I tried to be open to students' challenges outside the classroom, probing to find the reasons behind problematic behaviors, I was told that I was being too lenient. (Evidently, I was supposed to just assign detentions, on the assumption that if the punishments cause the behavior to go away, the problem is solved.) Every day, I found myself having to choose between what my students needed and what the school demanded, and being unable to find any common ground.<br /><br />I really wanted to believe in charter schools. Unfortunately, teaching in one (and interviewing with two others, where I saw plenty of evidence of the same problems) has firmly convinced me that such belief is misplaced, and that students' real educational and emotional needs are much better served by our traditional comprehensive public schools than by the charter schools that are trying to replace them.Jeff Biglerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13149709065508525085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3410387772840321888.post-8308343007852798092013-08-08T10:19:13.782-04:002013-08-08T10:19:13.782-04:00Part 1 of 2:
Based on my personal experience, thi...Part 1 of 2:<br /><br />Based on my personal experience, this post is spot on. I have been teaching for ten years, nine in regular public high schools interrupted by one year in a grades 6-12 charter school.<br /><br />I am a chemistry and physics teacher. In Massachusetts, by the time most high school students get to those courses, they have already passed their state-mandated MCAS science tests. (Unlike most states, Massachusetts tests students in science as well as ELA and math. High school students must pass a science test as well as ELA and math in order to graduate.) This means I get to teach the empty shells that are left of our students after they have spent a decade in classes with content and teaching methods that are guided by those tests.<br /><br />I have taught in comprehensive ("regular") public high schools in low, average, and high socioeconomic status (SES) communities. Across all socioeconomic levels, I have seen a steady decline in high-level thinking skills as I teach students who have spent more and more of their educational years in curriculum guided by the high-stakes tests. This is not surprising, and this observation has been borne out by countless others' experiences. However, in the year I spent teaching in a "no excuses" charter school, I found that the students' high level thinking skills were far inferior to the students I taught in comprehensive public high schools, including my current school, which serves a population with lower socioeconomic status than the community served by the charter school.<br /><br />When I teach science, I teach through demonstration, discussion, and hands-on experiments and activities. I use discrepant events (situations in which there is a discrepancy between what students expect and what actually happens) as much as possible to initiate these discussions. My comprehensive public school students can be a little shy at first, but they quickly warm up to the activities and enjoy them. They learn to overcome their fear of being wrong or of not understanding something and they develop a love of learning for learning's sake. (This is what is meant by the edubabble term "lifelong learners".)<br /><br />In contrast, my charter school students never developed this. They would sit quietly and attentively, as they had been trained to do, and wait for the teacher to explain everything. When I asked them what they *thought* or *guessed* might be happening in a demonstration (as a jumping-off point for a discussion), they would just say "I don't know." and shut down. Most of them would never attempt homework problems that deviated even slightly from the sample problems I went over in class. They also never attempted problems that required high-level thinking skills, such as a problem that combined multiple topics that we had studied at different times during the year.<br /><br />The grading system in place at the school exacerbated the problem. We graded students on each benchmark or standard separately. Each test question had to be tied to a benchmark or standard. We couldn't use test questions that combined benchmarks, because if a student was unable to answer the question, we would not know which benchmark was the problem, or whether the student understood the benchmarks separately and simply couldn't combine the concepts. In other words, the culture at the charter school and the system we used to assess students essentially prevented me from being able to teach high-level thinking skills.Jeff Biglerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13149709065508525085noreply@blogger.com