Unearned promotions cheat students
Sunday, February 7, 2010
When it comes to education, South Carolina continuously finds itself placed at or near the bottom, and yet South Carolina educators are looking to require fewer credits needed for graduation and to eliminate school days. Instead of cutting education, state legislators should focus on what needs to be done to strengthen South Carolina's educational system.
As a state, we might have some of the toughest educational standards and difficult standardized assessments, but have we looked at how students are performing against those standards and assessments?
I teach in a district where students continuously perform below those standards and are still pushed through to the next grade, where eighth-graders are reading and writing on fifth-grade levels. We need the state Legislature and department of education to start requiring districts to accept responsibility for the low performance of students.
Why are eighth-graders passed on to high school when they haven't demonstrated the ability to meet most of their middle school standards?
We are too worried about being politically correct and not hurting anyone's feelings to realize that we are sending students into the workforce unprepared.
We are sending a negative message to our students.
Blame the communities, the parents, the circumstances beyond our control all you want, but the fact of the matter is, we have the power to set a standard. And it might be rough at first, but once the standard is set, people start to conform to it.
Hold back the students who don't perform and give them the help they need because in the long run, what's worse -- promoting a student without any skills, or forgetting about feelings and political correctness and giving them a chance at a bright future?
Stacy Zeiger
Teacher
Eighth Grade ELA/English 1
Wampee Curve
Summerville
Sunday, February 07, 2010
Summerville Teacher Speaks on Literacy
5 comments:
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Anonymous said...
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As she is an eighth grade ELA teacher, does she include herself as part of the problem?
Is she a public school teacher? -
7:23 PM
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Babbie said...
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a teacher in DD4 at St. George Middle School
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7:43 PM
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Anonymous said...
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Annonymous 7:23 sounds like a Charleston County administrative employee who is either a brown nosing hack or just a subordinate with orders to do the superintendent's dirty work on-line. What this says is the superintendent is just circling the wagons instead of genuinely considering how to deal with the problem. Too often Dr. McGinley has shown she prefers to kill the messanger. So much for her dialogue.
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9:18 PM
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Anonymous said...
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Anonymous 9:18 sounds like he-she is simply a sycophant for the anti-teacher, pro-Charter rah-rahs who have no clue what goes on in public schools, but listens to whatever the newspapers or Charter school newsletters say they should listen to without much thought.
On to more substantive discussion, it is easy to blame the entire system for not educating children, but the problem is more omplex. How many children have severe learning disabilities at "failing schools"? Do you know? Do you hold back students until they are 17 in eighth grade because the middle school has only moved them from 2nd to 6th grade reading levels?
The teacher who wrote in is a gateway teacher. She should have used the term we; instead, she basically put it on someone else.
If she is willing to teach children in eighth grade until they reach a requisite level fine, but I think it reads a bit disingenuously. -
8:47 PM
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S. Zeiger said...
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I wrote this and, yes, I am a public school teacher. I spend countless hours trying to bring my students up to the levels they need to be at, but what I've noticed in my years of teaching at this school is a lack of consequences. I have students start the year saying "I'll just go to summer school and they'll pass me" and they're right. There is no consequence for not performing up to standards and, aside from teachers using their own time, there is little in place to get them where they need to be, learning disability or not.
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12:26 PM
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