Chicago Teachers are fighting harder for changes in how they
are being evaluated than they are for a nominal pay raise. In a nutshell; the
contracts, benefits and income of a teacher is now being based on an evaluation of their talents. WHAT’S WRONG WITH THAT!
Think about it as if you were a professional baseball coach
or manager and you and all the coaches in the league were given a mandate that
each of the players on your team, must hit .300, must hit 22 home runs, and
must steal at least 22 bases! WOW! What a team you would have! But does it and
can it happen? NO! Not in your wildest dreams. WHY? Because each of your players
have different talents, both physically and mentally, each have different
abilities and strengths, some are great infielders, some good hitter with the
speed to steal a base, others hit massive home runs.
Now think about a classroom. The teacher is given a large
group of children, each having different backgrounds. Some of the children come
from homes were their parents’ actively prepare and help their children for school.
Other parents have so many problems of their own, like putting food on the
table, struggling with drug additions, and living in the perpetual circle of
generational poverty or generational violence that preparing their child for
school, let along giving them proper nurturing, is far from being one of their
priorities!
Ladies and gentlemen, put yourself into a teachers’
position. Understand that all our schools and classrooms are different from
another, yet even now, the influx of children of poverty, children with limited
parental attention, is increasing within all our school systems! Teachers in
Grand Blanc over the recent years are seeing more and more troubled children as
their students. Even charter schools who for a time were secretly selective of
the students they allowed in, have now, due to there need to increase their
student population, thereby, increasing their profits, have to deal with this
problem just like Public Schools have. They’re all seeing what the inner city
schools deal with on a massive base every-single-day. LANSING, WE HAVE A PROBLEM!
What has the government done to correct this? They’ve
connected their funding to evaluations of schools and school teachers based on
every child having the potential of hitting .300, 22 home runs, and stealing at
least 22 bases! WHAT!
Okay, I am not saying teachers and schools should not be
evaluated and given goals to achieve within grade levels and overall testing
scores. It’s how it’s being use to evaluate the teachers that is unfair.
I will suggest here as I have suggested before, that
evaluation of teachers should not be done on student test scores, but be done
by their peers and administrators. Those are the people at ground zero that can
evaluate a teacher. Yes, for a time those administrators had their hands tied
by the unions and others to actively remove poor performing teachers. That is
not the case anymore.
The evaluation system being put in place is very, very bias.
It’s base on good students, ready to learn, sitting within the classroom. That
is not the reality of it!
Simply stated, the government looked at this situation and
took the most simplest and simplistic route in dealing with it. Connecting a teacher’s performance on an unrealistic,
pie in the sky premise; that all children have the potential of hitting a home
run! Sorry people, its time to see the truth, the awful truth, that some
children do not have the potential of hitting a home run. Heirisy, you say! “Don’t
we all have the potential to become President of the United States, or a chance
to be an astronaut?!” We all do have a chance, but it gets slimmer and slimmer
as poor parenting skills dominate a child’s life.
Don’t judge a teacher on what the world has done to a child,
judge a teacher on their work in overcoming it!
