Illinois reform problems or progress?
By SHARON S. BURRIS
Ten years ago, the Illinois Legislature enacted sweeping educational
reform. Soon after the passage of the Illinois Educational Reform Act of
1985, school superintendents expressed concern that the mandates of the act
would be underfunded and that additional staff would be needed to implement
many of the 169 separate aspects of the Reform Act.
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.
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