Part 2: When Will Katy I.S.D. Parents & Community Institutions Say Enough Is Enough?
December 29, 2008 by George
Filed under site updates
This column is Part 2 of our reporting upon and analysis of Katy I.S.D. training sessions that require classroom teachers to be pulled from their classrooms during the academic year, only to be replaced by significant numbers of uncertified substitutes.
How many certified Katy I.S.D. teachers have been pulled out of their classrooms during the academic year and required or ‘encouraged’ to participate in District hosted or sanctioned training programs, while being replaced on those days by uncertified substitute teachers?
The certified classroom teacher is the single most valuable asset that a school district has. Your child’s certified classroom teacher is one of the most important persons in your life for every year that you have a child in public education.
It is unspeakably incompetent and further tragic proof that your Katy I.S.D. School Board’s self-imposed, acquiescent ignorance extends to its abject failure to have any process in place that allows it to answer that question with immediate precision.
Parents should understand what this issue is NOT. It is NOT about training. Every corporation or organization of any size sponsors training of its employees.
However, it is not unreasonable to expect that an extensive training program would have measurable goals associated with it as well as premeditated standards of post-training accountability.
Since the mission of public education is to produce the highest quality of educated student as possible, the only relevant way to evaluate the training is to evaluate improvement in student academic performance.
You have a legitimate reason to question the competence of a school board that does not have such a system in place. It is an egregious failure of its responsibilites for a school board to fail to evaluate its superintendent of schools on the effectiveness of any program that takes certified teachers out of the classroom during the academic year.
Parents have a right to expect a school board to evaluate its superintendent for the effectiveness of curriculum-based initiatives in terms of improvement in student academic performance. Anything less is breach of confidence.
Here’s my question to parents. How long are you going to tolerate this from your school board?
This issue of training that is symbolized by the December 2 training session for middle school teachers is a bay window into the inner workings of a public school district.
It is about curriculum management philosophy run amok. It is about curriculum administrators who have become so self-absorbed in self-righteous self-importance that they think they must have invented the classroom.
Katy I.S.D. is a school district that made a decision to abandon six days of classroom instruction due to Hurricane Ike. (For the record, I understand that decision even if I do not agree with writing off all six days).
Yet, with six days of instruction literally blown away, your school board and your administration continue to pull certified teachers out of the classroom during the academic year and replace them with uncertified substitutes.
This is nothing less than unrestrained administrative arrogance, enabled by equal amounts of unrestrained tolerance by a school board that is unable or unwilling to do its job of oversight.
This situation is not going to change until the parents say they have had enough, or until the institutions of this community assume a leadership role in reform.
We are going to address these institutions’ roles later this week.
Mr. Scott,
You have addressed a serious problem in our school district. Taking teachers out of the classroom to train them when the District already sets aside more days for staff development than is required by the Texas Education Agency seems a bit over the top.
If one has been a teacher, and I have, then one also is aware of how much of a teacher’s time is wasted with the Staff Development program. And now you’ve discovered that we’ve come to the point where administrators deem it necessary to take teachers away from their students for this stuff!
I’ve not ever seen anyone declare the real reason for these interminable teacher training sessions, so one is left to guess at the motivation. In my opinion, the reasons for them are many.
First, they serve to recreate a teacher in the school district’s image. That is to say, having a college degree and suffering through countless education courses delivered by college professors who couldn’t cut it in any other subject is apparently not enough to create a teacher. The district wants to put their own stamp on them. One should ask why that is.
Second, the sessions provide overpaid administrators a chance to show their wares. The program also provides a venue for retired administrators who have learned how to create mini sideshows for the purpose of feathering their personal nests–all in the name of “staff development.”
Third, staff development is another means of government control: never mind what a teacher wants to do in HER classroom, here’s what WE decided she should do.
Gone are the days when teachers were educated as such and then trusted to walk into a classroom and deliver the knowledge they had accumulated.
In today’s school, knowledge isn’t required–just methodology and facilitation.
I groused a couple of years ago when our school district didn’t make up days for a hurricane that never came to Katy, but for which the district shut down anyway. I was especially critical when other districts (where they actually had a hurricane) saw fit to cover those missed days, and Katy ISD did not. Our district includes make up days when the Board creates the calendar, so one has to wonder why at least those days were not used this year. Of course everyone enjoys a free week off (I would have been happy about such a week when I was a teacher,) but is that really the best use of our tax dollars when we seem to always be short of funds and when our taxes are among the highest in the state?
I’m also wondering what happened to a curriculum designed for eighteen weeks when that became less than seventeen. If the curriculum were discarded, how important could it have been in the first place–which raises new questions. If it were rolled over into the second semester, I suppose that nullifies the District’s perennial argument about the inability to conclude a semester before Christmas because the curriculum cannot be completed!
Another question that comes to mind is “what is so terribly difficult about block scheduling that requires an entire day to relate?” Surely a one page memo explaining the process should have sufficed.
The district appears to be hijacking you, Mr. Scott, by charging you excessive amounts in order to see materials that are assuredly in the public interest. If one follows the link you provided to this “differentiated math instruction” PDF file, one can see the tremendous waste of time perpetrated on our teachers for an entire day while their students were most assuredly babysat by uncertified (in math) substitute teachers. As a teacher, I would have been insulted by such an infantile offering.
I’m wondering if our school board has ever asked to see the cost for 12,000 sessions of staff development since 2006. And is that number spread out over two and a half or only one and a half years? And what percentage of these sessions have resulted in teachers absent from classrooms? And surely that many sessions cannot be covered by the “staff development days,” so how much of their own time are teachers having to donate?
Public school superintendents have gotten our witless state legislators to put into law requirements for staff development. That’s de rigueur. But school boards, (and concerned legislators), should rise up in protest of this huge, partly legislated boondoggle that helps no one and hurts the education of school children.