Oh, the pain! We are doing two days worth of training with Project CRISS, which is just a lot of the same strategies I have gotten at SIOP, Kagan, the year at the Model Lab, and of course, my previous CRISS training.
Its great stuff, but the majority of people really won't implement, or know how to implememt correctly, or even open their 200+ page manual they got today, but the district can say everyone's been trained or is using Project CRISS....
It was in the paper this week that if my old school Sam Houston (and two others) don't get out of the "UNACCEPTABLE" rating they'll close them! What? Its the buildings fault that TAKS score are below where they should be?
So if they close it, all those 2800 students can find desk in other HISD schools and start performing now that they have a new address? All those new kids are going to need teachers, is there an available pool of teachers looking for jobs? I guess all the ones from the closed down schools, right? Because if there were 200+ "great teachers" looking for jobs, they'd been hired by the schools before they closed down, but they don't exist!
But maybe it is the school! Do the classrooms have all the resources that schools in the high performing KATY ISD do, nope! There's an old saying about "garbage in - garbage out". But what about if you put stuff in a garbage can, will good stuff still come out good, or is everything that comes out of a garbage can automatically garbage?
I was at Sam Houston two of the low performing years, but I don't remember anyone coming in from a high performing school and telling us how they do it?
If you look at state education for the 50 states over the last 10 years, I think the bottom 10 always contain Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. Can we send all those kids to school in Utah and then their SAT scores go up?
I'm not syaing I have any solution immediately on my mind, but I do know these comments about "closing the schools" are only going to move the problem to a different zipcode!
Oh, I just spent a year becoming an IPC teaching expert, and this year I get assigned ZERO IPC classes, and you want to know why HISD has problems? But one week worth of College Board training and I get to teach Pre-AP Chemistry!
3 comments:
I called you... your turn.
Someone said that they would bring in charter schools to run Sam after breaking it up into smaller schools. Who knows.
I have to admit that I no longer totally disagree with closing it. I don't think that the scores are going to turn around and everyone is going to become an A student, but I think the school is too big and lacks good discipline structure. Its also really hard to keep up with things when the district insists on changing everything every 6 months and the admins do stupid things like letting go of good teachers and pissing off good ones so much that they don't WANT to go back.
I think you have something there about it being the fault of the building. Because you get to the point where it's all so wrong that starting over might be a good idea. But no, there aren't places for the kids to go, or they don't want to. you know, like the good kids from the neighborhood who got their butts into magnet schools.
Some people from my school last year kept talking about how the teachers didn't need to worry about getting fired if they got reconstituted. That it would be admin first. After what happened at Sam, I just laughed bitterly. Isn't it pretty to think so.
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