The Charter School Teacher Who Suffers from Test Depression
Updates from the school "reform" movement.
Thanks again to Diane Ravitch's blog, we get directed to a post by a woman named Emily Kaplan, who worked at a celebrated charter school in Boston, and who now works in a public school because the charter school sounds like a tiny step up from kiddie boot camp. The beginning of this post makes me depthlessly sad.
On the wall to their right is a list of the class averages from the last six network assessments (taken by all second graders across the charter network's three campuses), all of which are in the 50s and 60s. Even though these two-hour tests are designed by network leaders to be exceptionally challenging—a class average of an 80% is the holy grail of teachers, who use their students' scores to compete for status and salary increases—this class's scores are the lowest in the school, and the students know it. The teacher speaks to them in a slow, measured tone. "When I left school here yesterday, after working hard all day to give you a good education so you can go to college, I felt disappointed. I felt sad." Shoulders drop. Children put their faces in their hands. "And do you know why?" The teacher looks around the circle; children avert their eyes. One child raises her hand tentatively. "We didn't do good on our tests?" The teacher nods. "Yes, you didn't do well on your assessments. Our class average was very low. And so I felt sad. I went home and I felt very sad for the rest of the day."
I have heard—and I have engaged in—much mockery concerning the use of pedagogical guilt in my Catholic elementary education, but never did I think that by getting an "F" in The Charter School Teacher Who Suffers from Test Depression:
