Teachers cannot be held responsible to make sure students are at school every day. Teachers cannot be held responsible for students who refuse to do ANY work in the room, and who get outwardly HOSTILE when the concept is even WHISPERED in their presence. Teachers cannot be held accountable for parents' GROSS lack of interest in their children's educations. Teachers cannot be held responsible for administrators' lack of support in maintaining civil school environments. Teachers can LEAD the horse to water, but cannot FORCE the horse to drink as much of society BELIEVES they can!!!
Also, one of the stipulations by which a teacher's effectiveness is to be judged is the lack of ANY DISRUPTION in the classroom. That's right. If Johnny decides to disrupt and sing out in class, thus disrupting other students, this automatically labels the teacher as "ineffective" since the classroom environment is not maintained in such a manner as to be conducive to learning at all times. I challenge ANYONE in society to run six classes a day with absolutely ZERO disruptions!!! Guaranteed it cannot be done, hence the fact that this standard is RIDICULOUS AND UNATTAINABLE!!!
Putting this debate into such euphemistic terminology and catch phrases is quite convenient for those who are not privy to the goings-on of the education environment (from the TEACHERS' persepctives), but these terms and phrases are ultimately disingenuous...
Good post.
By your account teachers can’t be held accountable for anything. I don’t believe that is true for one minute. I have had enough encounters with teachers, and administrators to see just how little the teachers and the school administrators are willing to do these days. Here is just one example of what I mean. Parents are becoming more and more frustrated with this type of behavior and we discuss it all the time, and feel like we are hitting our heads up against the wall because teachers’ can’t be required to do things because it isn’t in their contract.
Teachers used to call parents that same day if a child didn’t turn in a home work assignment without being asked to do so. Now teachers refuse to call parents even if they specifically request that they be notified immediately of any missing assignments.
Teachers contracts in our district require that parents be notified immediately if there is any substantial change in a child’s performance in their classrooms, so perhaps you can tell me how a student’s grade can drop from an A to an F the last day of a term due to missing assignments from the beginning of the term. You wouldn’t beleive all the excuses I was given when this happened to my child after they had been ill for almost two weeks toward the beginning of the term.
The teacher had supposedly given my child the all the missing assignments which I had picked up at the school while she was absent and she had turned in all of those assignments. The teacher, however, failed to give her all the assignments that she had missed out on, and then when she finally got around to entering the grades the day before report cards were sent, out my child’s grade dropped from an A to an F because of 5 missing assignments the teacher had never given to her to complete. It took me three months to get to the bottom of what happened and that teacher was not even reprimanded for not following their own rules, not keeping up with her grading, etc.
In discussing the matter with other parents who have children at the school every one of them had similar encounters with various teachers in the school district. I had to threaten to get a lawyer before they finally agreed to not dock my child’s grade for the assignments since she was never given in the first place by the teacher and we had done everything we should have to insure she had the work she needed to complete. This changed her grade back to an A.
While there are still some good teachers out there, many good teachers get chastized because they do things that are above and beyond what is required by their union contract. I know of several teachers, that actually were disciplined because they did call every time students didn’t turn in assignments.
When I went to school, teachers were held responsible for what went on in their classrooms, and how well the student’s learned the material they were taught. Private schools for the most part still operate this way. In my opinion, if teachers can’t produce results, then they have no business teaching and it should be up to the teacher to call a parent if the. If there is any problem with a child turning in work, distrupting the classroom, etc. the teacher should notify the parents that day! If teachers don’t communicate with the parents, then parent’s can’t do much of anything to correct the situation.
I am clearly not alone in my views, at least not at the schools here and we have better test scores here in Oregon than in many other states, although they clearly could be a lot better if the communication directly between teachers and parent’s was improved.