Waste

There is the waste of paper.

There is the waste of instructional time.

There is the waste of students’ learning time.

There is the waste of professional time—the time of all those professionals who have been promoted out of the classroom to create assessment instruments, gather data, make up reporting software, draw up comparative charts to disseminate statistics, dream up new flow charts for rehabilitating students “falling behind” the norms arbitraily set by the assessment teams.

Friday morning two of these professionals, educators from the front office, were in place for our faculty meeting at 8:00 am to show us the new software designed for teachers to set their instructional objectives for the year (called SGOs, for Student Growth Objectives.)  One of these professional educators was a thirty-something African American woman; the other an Hispanic man of similar age and expertise.  Both spoke articulately about the merits of this new program and how imperative it was for each of us to enter our SGOs before October 31st, although they could be negotiated with the principal and amended until mid-March of the schoolyear.  The online program they introduced had lots of options and drop-down menus, places for comments and special boxes for checking off people who were allowed access to the objectives a teacher wrote.  It was further emphasized that the objectives would be evaluated by the principal and the teacher towards the end of the year, but succeeding in meeting one’s objectives (or failing to) would not be associated with increased (or decreased) pay.  Retention of job was not mentioned, but perhaps is on the line.

With the audience slightly dazed by the presentation, the principal then assured us that she would be soon presenting the official Denison School Improvement Plan so that we could align our objectives with that plan (never mind what one’s particular class’s needs might be) and that there would be further sessions for discussing how this process was to proceed.

What struck me was the waste of time represented by the hours it took to design the elaborate software  required to create the program, the professional time of the two educators who were clearly all about this program and would be invited to schools throughout the district to explain it, the waste of time for all the teachers in our building to listen to the nonsense that ostensibly would not matter to us anyway, and the time of the principal who is preoccupied by the “School Improvement Plan,” which is all about meeting AYP instead of children’s needs.

Think of all of the high level, highly qualified adults in the field of education who are spending their days in front of computers that design assessment programs, instruments, data analyis and reporting programs, teacher assessment programs, and complex rubrics for pushing children ahead faster than they can go.  All of those hours could be devoted to helping children learn.  Hundreds of thousands of hours from trained professional educators could be shifted to public school classrooms, where the true action is and where all the problems of education must ultimately be solved.

What a waste!