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Miami-Dade should take an early lesson from the Palm Beach County education nightmare
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Protest outside Spanish River High in Boca Raton
As of this year, it is mandatory in Palm Beach County. In Miami-Dade and Broward Counties, it is still optional at this point--but 250 different elementary schools are already implementing it, nonetheless.
We're talking about elementary schoolchildren switching classes like middle school or high school students.
The move to the "departmentalization" of elementary schools comes amidst the ever-raging debate over No Child Left Behind, the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), the state's system of setting and enforcing standards, and the state's system of ranking (or assigning "grades") to publicly funded schools (including charter schools).
Proponents of the new system of departmentalizing primary schools say that it allows teachers to provide instruction in the field(s) they are most qualified in, and exposes children to a greater range of teaching strategies and styles for each subject.
However, critics of the new system are many and vocal in Palm Beach County. The outrage is so great in some quarters that Boca Raton is even seriously considering wresting control of its schools from the Palm Beach County School District and turning them into charter schools.
Even though Palm Beach County has a highly-ranked school system, the changes are, according to Superintendent Art Johnson, necessary to make sure that all schools can meet high standards.
Yet a huge number of parents and teachers are vehemently opposed to the changes, for a number of reasons. Teachers are required to cover certain benchmarks not only within a given time frame, but down to the day: they are all expected to be teaching the exact same things on the exact same days. They are even required to use lesson plans provided in the online "Learning Village." According to many teachers and parents, the calendar does not correspond to the textbooks being used, and is far too fast-paced, so that students are working out of several chapters within one textbook simultaneously, leading to confusion and falling grades even among bright children. One of the biggest reasons for protest against the new program is the so-called "embedded assessments." Under the new system, students were to be required to take a district-created assessment every three weeks, testing the benchmarks scheduled to be taught during that time period. Theoretically, the data gained from those assessments would help teachers and administrators figure out how their students were doing on the new skills and material, and allow them to make interventions where needed. However, in reality, because of the extremely strict and rigorous timeline for covering standards, teachers are not afforded the luxury of intervening when they see their students struggling with the benchmarks; if they were to spend some extra time with struggling students remediating the existing problems, they would fall further behind on the calendar, and then their students would not be ready for the next "embedded assessment" three weeks down the road.
One such concerned parent e-mailed me personally to ask what I thought of the situation. While I knew very little about it, since I mostly follow what goes on in Miami-Dade County schools, I have since done a little research on it, and this mother sent me fifty pages of letters to the Palm Beach County teachers' union. What I have seen in all of these sources is a great deal of stress, distress and frustration. Parents are, quite rightly, concerned that their children are being stressed out by the frequent testing and by their scores on those tests, by the changing of classes and teachers and the work overload caused by working out of multiple chapters within the same textbook at the same time. Most teachers were not given any training for how to adjust to the new arrangement, and in their letters to the union, teacher after teacher complained that he/she no longer liked going to work in the morning, because they felt that the changes were hurting the children and impeding their own ability to teach. They are also subject to constant observations.
These changes are being implemented even in schools that have had an A rating for several years straight.
Last month, mother Lisa Goldman created a Facebook page called "Testing is not Teaching: PBC Citizens united to make a difference!" that already has 5325 fans, and counting, in protest of the new system that overloads students and frustrates parents and teachers. Due in large part thanks to their organized protests, the Palm Beach County school district ceded some ground last Thursday, and announced that some flexibility would be built into the plan. Principals will now be allowed to use the district-created assessments, or create their own, and will have more discretion over when to administer the assessments.
The new structure of the Palm Beach County program is inherently flawed. While most people agree that there should be consistent standards in place to make sure that children are learning the skills and material they need to learn to be educated citizens and to be ready for college, and that there does need to be a system for implementing them, the Palm Beach model is deeply troubled. For one thing, "one-size-fits-all" lesson plans simply cannot work. Teachers have different teaching methods, strategies and styles; they are not robots. If you think back about your favorite teachers when you were in school, you will certainly recall that they did not all teach exactly the same way. While there is (in my opinion) nothing wrong with expecting teachers to cover certain standards and material within a given time frame, expecting all teachers to teach exactly the same way and at exactly the same pace is not only absurd, it's dangerous. Good teachers not only have their own methods and styles--they also know how to adjust their pace, methods, strategies and instructional style to meet the needs of their students. If students are struggling, they need to have the flexibility to slow a lesson down, or to backtrack a bit, to make sure that they understand before pushing ahead. Likewise, if the students are getting the material easily, the teacher should have the discretion to be able to move ahead, or explore other areas of the topic more in-depth. If no children are to be left behind--including special needs children, low-performing children and the oft-forgotten gifted children--teachers need to have flexibility to adjust their lesson plans as needed.
And while it may sound good on paper to have teachers teaching within their "areas of expertise" in elementary school like they do in middle school, high school or college, that concept ignores some fundamental differences between elementary school and secondary school. For starters, while teachers being stronger in certain areas than in others sounds logical and is surely true, at the end of the day, elementary reading, math, social studies and science are just that...elementary. Any individual certified to teach elementary school should be perfectly capable of teaching any of those subjects; and if they are not, that only demonstrates more of a problem in the teacher certification system than in elementary education as a concept. I am terrible at math, and use a calculator for pretty much everything. Nonetheless, I feel that I could quite competently teach children how to add, subtract, and do multiplication and division. If these teachers truly do not have the minimum competency to teach such basic skills and knowledge, they should not be teaching at all; and that is a different problem entirely (if it does indeed exist at all).
Most elementary teachers go into that particular area of education precisely because they are interested in the most salient aspect of elementary education: children's mental, psychological and social development. When children spend all day with one classroom teacher, that teacher is able to assess the child's development across the whole spectrum, get to know the parents, and attend to the child's individual needs. When the children see several different teachers throughout the day, and when those teachers see over a hundred students a day, that rapport-building and the ability to assess development is necessarily lost.
Younger children also need structure even more than adolescents (who need it badly). Parents of elementary students in Palm Beach County report their children being confused and frustrated by the changing of classes, by not having a desk of their own or a place to keep their belongings, and by the overload of work and tests. Teachers complain of not being able to attend to the children's individual needs, or even really get to know the children; they also complain of being expected to work with the kids bell-to-bell, with no room for creative or fun activities that young children not only crave but also need. Recess, art, music--all of those provide different things for developing children, and stimulate them mentally and psychologically. Expecting six-year-olds to move like automatons from one class to another, sit down and work bell-to-bell, then get up and sit still in the next room to work bell-to-bell, all day long borders on insanity. Children do need to work and listen and learn. But they also need to move around, play and do creative activities. When teachers are not allowed to give the kids the time, space and guidance to do play constructively and use their creativity, it is little wonder the result is frustration on all sides.
So far, the Palm Beach County experiment appears, from most perspectives, to be a nightmare. It is not too late for Miami-Dade County to avoid making the same mistake. The elementary schools currently voluntarily having students changing classes can see how the experiment goes. But the departmentalization in combination with inflexible schedules and incessant testing (even when that testing does not allow teachers to use the data obtained from it to remediate deficiencies) seems to be a recipe for disaster.
We must not allow standardized testing worship to strangle what it means to be a child...or an elementary school teacher. When it comes to education, different children learn in different ways; teachers teach in different ways. Yes, children can and should be held to high standards, and yes, teachers should as well, and should be expected to teach certain things. But human beings are not robots. Children must be allowed to be children, and teachers must be allowed to do what they went into their profession to do: teach, and use their own skills, styles and strategies to make sure that they reach their children.
It is already extremely difficult to recruit qualified teachers to the profession. Now, many Palm Beach County teachers, experienced and new alike, are seriously talking about leaving the district, or changing careers. They feel that what they are doing is not teaching, and that they are not paid enough to betray their own beliefs of what teaching is and what their role as a teacher should be.
Children want the old way back. So do their parents. So do teachers. It is little wonder that it is those in administration in the district who insist on clinging to this ill-fated experiment...those who have the least connection to the classroom, many of whom have never even been classroom teachers, yet believe that having read scholarly articles (written by others who have not been in a classroom in years, if ever) and books about education makes them qualified to decide what is and is not right for children, their families and their teachers.
Perhaps it should be a requirement that all high-level school administrators teach for at least a month using the program they wish to mandate before they mandate it.
If that were the case, it is unlikely Palm Beach County ever would have happened.
And we could rest assured that it would not be repeated in Miami-Dade, Broward, or any other Florida school district.
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