Against Cuts Website has important Powerpoints and Flyers to Print OUt

http://againstcuts.org/

*Special Written Assignment on School Mandates

It Is Hard to See How Mandates Are Supporting Us

By Sunny Dawn, Cleveland Elem., San Francisco, CA.

            My K-5 elementary school is on the East Side of San Francisco where we experience a population of students who are disenfranchised and have huge disparities in relation to the West Side of the same city.  This paper will give a brief overview of how district mandated quarterly assessments are not serving the students at my elementary school’s in San Francisco or serving as proper tools for teachers to gain an understanding of students’ educational needs especially in schools such as mine who have students “of color” or bilingual schools.  Furthermore it will present the idea that current administration is also unaware how to serve the needs of the teachers in creating tools for proper instruction.

My class is a good representation of the half the school’s population,  which is 80% of low socioeconomic background English language learners.  The range of ethnicities include; Chinese, Filipino, African American as well various type of Latino students from Central American to Mexican.  There are over 5 different home languages represented in my class and half of my class travels regularly out of the country to visit a majority of their extended families.  The other half of the school is the bilingual strand, which experience a wide range of issues from immigration, to high poverty, as well as various health issues.

Although we have dedicated teachers who are committed to social justice in education it is hard to see how the current district administration is supporting us.  We are given release time once a week to talk with our grade level about educational strategies but, instead of teachers being able to lead the discussions a majority of meetings are led by a district appointed “Instructional Reform Facilitator” or (IRF). This IRF then reports back to the principal and district administrations about the  “discussion” which is always results or application of the quarterly district mandated assessment (or CLAs).

I recently went to a Union meeting discussion about district mandated assessments in October of 2011.  At this meeting over 20 elementary teachers from a wide variety of schools were present and furious about how the district mandated assessments are developmentally inappropriate for K thru 2^nd and in 3^rd thru 5th grades material is often unaccessable for many students especially English Language Learners.  When the Head of Achievement Assessments, John Burke,  was asked at that October meeting, how are these assessments were helpful to teachers his reply was,”well hopefully we will be able to make the tests align to the curriculum especially with math this year,” A follow up question to this district official was asked by another elementary teacher, “If these assessments are not aligned with the standards, if it is wasting the student’s time because it’s not testing them on what they are supposed to have learned then why can’t we halt that until it is perfected?” His response, “Right now, again we are trying to serve two purposes with it. Some to inform instruction some for the benchmarking. So right now that’s what we have. This year it’s much more of a compromise, last year towards the benchmarking….The CLAs are mandated by Richard Caranza so the expectations is that  everyone…..”

Finally my staff was given anonymous polls using the website, www.pollseverywhere.com , to find out their feelings on district mandates.  The first question given was, “I feel like I have enough time to go over data from mandated assessments and implement action in my classroom?” 87% of the 15 staff who participated in the survey said, “NO” Also my staff participated in two more surveys in which 57% of the staff (who participated) reported “we have too many assessments”.  The final question given to staff, “The district mandated assessments my students take are on material we have had a chance to cover in class prior to the date required to give test?” 100% of the staff disagreed or strongly disagreed with this statement (see attached graphs or go to www.msdawnsturntospeak.blogspot.com to see poll results).

In conclusion, elementary teachers educated and trained observations are that district mandated assessments do not serve their classroom pedagogy and are actually damaging children instead.

National Board Test Chat for EC/GEN.

://ecgen.org/2012/03/nbpts-assessment-center-season-almost-here/

Stop The Monkey Business!