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School Board Journal
March / April

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Illinois reform problems or progress?
By SHARON S. BURRIS

While the mandates have not all been fully funded and while there has been a need to hire more staff to manage the additional paperwork created by the reforms of 1985, there have been more serious consequences; and some of these have affected classrooms and the students in those classrooms and students.

First, the volume of paperwork generated by the School Improvement Process (SIP) has eroded staff morale and has taken the teacher away from the very students the teacher wants to serve. Schools should be (and have been) places where students and teachers alike look forward to going; a place where smiles come easy and where jokes and riddles are shared by students and by teachers. A school should be a place where care and concern are shown. Now many educators report that school is just no fun anymore. You have to keep documents on student progress and there has to be paperwork forms on where each student is in terms of 34 or more student outcomes for each student. It is a formable task at best!

Accountability is not the problem. Talk with any teacher almost anywhere. Nearly any teacher on any given day can tell you where each student is in any subject area. A teacher can tell you who is ahead in what area and who is behind in any area. Student names are far more real (and more important) than numbers and percents, as student performance is now measured.

Many teachers have personalized the SIP to be an evaluation of themselves and of how well they taught for a given school year. These teachers breathe by SIP plans, IGAP scores, and the paper documentation of what the teacher can already, but in informal ways, tell about each student. The extensive paperwork often prevents educators from having frequent and positive interactions with their students. Stress is evident; frustration is seen in the faces of teachers and is heard in voices.

Most schools have had as their major strength the care and commitment of the staff toward students. This was the human element. People who were in schools wanted to be there, they liked what they did, they cared about students, and they looked forward to being at school.

Now that same staff is tired and weary. The very act of quantifying student actions, of developing rubrics, of charting and graphing student progress, or getting paperwork for the SIP documented has taken time away from teacher and student interactions. The teaching and learning tasks involve mutual trust, mutual understanding, and for many, mutual work. Many teachers report being away from students some 15 to 20 days each school year to do their paperwork or to plan school improvement activities. If these teachers were students, we would consider them truant. They are not in the classroom with enough frequency to do an adequate job of educating the students.

And now, after ten years of reform efforts, who can say if what students know and are able to do is better than it was before? We who are in education can tell that our jobs are much more difficult with the over-emphasis on documentation. We see morale decline, we see people enjoying themselves less, and we see stress. We do not see a purpose to this madness, unless that purpose is to remove the human element from its effectiveness in educating students.

Illinois school superintendent Joseph Spagnolo has said that schools should be customer driven and that the students are the customers. Illinois schools have always been service driven, with the diverse needs of every student being met to the extent possible. It has been assumed that the schools, and the teachers who serve those schools, knew more than the students in the schools. It has been assumed that the teacher and the child's parents were the adults and would teach the students skills that were needed for adulthood.

"Customer driven schools" assumes that students and their parents all want to take the high road, not the easiest road possible. It assumes that the customers know what is best for them and that the customer has the maturity to choose what is best even if that choice delays his or her gratification to a future time. Such assumptions are neither valid nor do they exhibit common sense.

One has to wonder about the influence of manufacturing and business in education in Illinois. Terms typically associated with business are being used in education customer driven, standard, regulation, quantify, quantify, and quantify. Maybe that is what happens when you are consumer-driven.

On the other hand, when people are your strongest resource, and when those people have the time and energy to care and to work with students, you see learning happen and you see people proud of what happens in schools.

Sharon S. Burris is assistant superintendent of Massac County Unit District 1.