Malaise

Last week my school was evaluated "objectively" by a jury of our peers.

This week we are in a funk. We knew we had our problems, but we have spent so many years comparing our work to that of the other urban schools in our district, that we started to think we were doing a good job. Thus it was difficult to hear that our instructional strategies (which we thought were pretty good) were not up to snuff.

Different segments of the school population are handling this funk differently. Teachers are looking for professional development to improve instructional strategies (which were found wanting), or trying to form informal groups designed to provide the instructional leadership that is missing higher up the pay-scale. Students are being a bit hostile (which is a typical teenage reaction to adults when the adults are less forgiving). And the Administration is planning to solve our instructional difficulties with more administering. That means teachers will be receiving more emails about being rigorous, with more links to poorly written doctoral theses in education, but little in the way of observations or suggestions for improvement.

We all know what needs to happen, teachers must make more of what time they have. We need to spend less time on simple recall of facts, and we need to spend more time on the complex evaluation of those facts. Most of my colleagues take no issue with this. Our funk does not stem from the fact that there is room for improvement in our performance. It stems from the fact that our cheese has been moved again. For years we were told that to do well, our students had to do well on the state mandated tests. We worked hard to improve their performance, and we were broadly successful. Now we receive this evaluation, and the principal, the superintendent, and a broad swath of district administrators all say "DO BETTER" while offering little to guide us. They all begin the process of instituting some sort of minor change at their level that is meant to fix the problem, but they offer very little in the way of actual leadership. Each of my many bosses heard this news and focussed in on some tiny facet of the larger problem to beat into the ground.

Our funk stems from the fact that we have little faith that these efforts will help us become better teachers. We are worried that lots of new paperwork is in the offing, that we are not doing a very good job, that the students aren't getting all they could out of our classes, and we aren't exactly sure how to solve the real issue of improving the quality of what we do every day.