By Tamara

Travis and Mark have recently touched upon two issues that I am working to get my head around: addressing an institutional culture of sameness and how to equitably budget my time and energy for students all over the needs spectrum. I’m not sure they are even related issues-so I will address them in separate posts-but right now they are the ones with the greatest impact on my life in the classroom.

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By Mark

A few posts ago, I unknowingly issued myself a challenge. I've written here at SfS for a few years, I've been a leader and advocate in my own district, and I've contacted my legislators via email and phone… but I'd yet to move to the next level.

I'll be heading to Olympia on February 20th.

I'm nervous, I won't lie. I'm not always the most confident in my ability to be coherent and articulate when I don't have time to go back to revise (and even then, sometimes…). 

It started when an email from the CSTP-Listserv arrived in my in-box: opportunity knocking, time for me to answer.

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By Tamara

WELPA, MSP, MAP…. What I used to think of as second semester (or even spring) has now become in my mind “Alphabet Soup Season”. It is also when my instructional year is put on hold for seven weeks. For the next four weeks my “teaching” day will consist of nothing but proctoring the annual language proficiency test. It takes four weeks because I have sixty-eight students in seven grade levels to test in four sub-sets: Reading, Writing, Listening, and Speaking (which is one-on-one with each student). Then in late April (as we all know) instruction crashes to a halt again for MSP. I don’t think losing seven weeks of instruction (more, really, when you factor in MAP) was what the feds had in mind when they crafted the assessment requirements for NCLB.

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By Tom

Well, now that National School Choice Week is behind us, maybe we can use this week to discuss a related topic; one that hasn’t come up yet on this blog: teacher choice. It’s one thing to choose a school, but once there, most parents have relatively little say in regards to who actually teaches their child.

It’s as if you and your honey spent an hour deciding on a Valentine’s Day restaurant. Then, when you get there, it’s “Welcome to Beth’s Café. You’ll have the patty melt. We hope you’ll enjoy it.”

Let me just say from the get-go that I’m ambiguous on this topic. I’m ambiguous because I'm both a parent and a teacher.

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By Mark

If you were not aware already, the way we teachers are going to be evaluated in the state of Washington is undergoing change. (I've mentioned it here at SfS twice before: first here, and then a follow up here.)

After a recent staff meeting, the WEA teaching staff in my building was asked to cast a vote between one of two options for "frameworks" upon which our future evaluations would be based in our district. Because people have heard I've been involved with a TPEP workgroup, every few steps I took after the meeting, someone said to me "just tell me, which one should I vote for?"

With all due respect to my colleauges, who I love and I know were horribly over-worked having just finished the frantic rush of sleepless nights that is semester finals, this very question is a symptom of a critical problem I think many teachers face.

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By Mark

Caretaker, keeper, steward, guardian. One who protects, maintains, facilitates. Teachers are custodians of our children and thus our future. I strive to be a good custodian.

Someone else who strives to be a good custodian–a true caretaker, guardian, and steward–is the woman who I pass most days after school as she pushes her cart down my hallway. Of course, she is my building's janitor–a custodian by all the definitions. 

So I came into school Tuesday morning to a note on my desk from my custodian.

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By Tamara

With levy renewal votes on the horizon for many of
Washington’s districts I’ve been thinking a lot about what an education worth
paying for should look like. I think we
can all agree a solid grasp of fundamental skills in reading and math should be
a non-negotiable outcome. Followed by the ability to form, support, and articulate
an argument whether spoken or written. Art, music, physical education, and
technological literacy each play critical roles in the development of those
skills. As a bookend, adequate time
within the working day for teachers to plan and collaborate on lessons should
also be non-negotiable. That is the core of an education I want for my own
children and one I would support monetarily beyond taxes.

Yet I find myself in an uncomfortable position as a teacher
with a “backstage view” of how resources are allocated. When I witness my district
making new curriculum adoption with all its attending professional development
year after year (especially this year with the full knowledge Common Core is
coming) as a taxpayer, I feel short-changed. When I know first- hand that
developing proficiency with new curriculum and assessments takes time, as a
parent I worry my children are not getting the quality instruction their teachers
are capable of if not having to adjust to yet another adoption. Those are the biggies. But I also find myself
thinking , “Really, we are paying for children to spend twenty minutes reading
with a “Reading Rover” dog because a dog
is so much better at imparting literacy skills?” and “Really, we need five certificated
staff to proctor MAP to twenty-six
students for two hours out of the instructional day?” We have an entire room
full of class sets of books that we actually hired a “volunteer” to organize
but that no one has used in classroom instruction for at least three years. Sure
some of these expenditures are site-based decisions. But whether site-based or
district-wide, this is not how I expect my tax dollars for education to be spent.

So I am on the fence about my local levy. To vote no feels
like cutting off my nose to spite my face. But voting yes feels like a stamp of
approval for resource allocation I cannot as a parent, taxpayer, or educator
support.