Where Should States Invest Their Educatonal Dollars: Technology or Teachers?

            

Where Should States Invest Their Educational Dollars:

Technology or Teachers?

    With the current economic situation many state legislatures are forced to make difficult decisions when allocating their educational budgets:  technology or teachers, but is this really such a difficult decision?  Assuming that all students come to school to learn (which they don’t)more technology: more computers, more IPads, more Smart Boards and more computerized education program seems like an easy fix.  Seriously, would you set your five years in room with a plethora of educational toys and no responsible adult to direct his learning?  I don’t think so.  Computers, IPads, ITVs, Smart Boards, Voice Enhancement Equipment, and any number of computer generated testing and teaching programs may enhance education, but they aren’t the core of education. 

                Schools are not learning factories that can be manned by robots and machinery to turn out high quality students.  Students are people.  Some students are highly motivated to learn and can learn virtually independently of others. Often these students learn, but do not develop social skills like Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory, absolutely brilliant person, but completely socially inept.  In our society, it is not enough to be brilliant.  Students need to develop the communication and social skills to work in a diverse world.  Most students are not highly motivated.  Most people (students included) need someone to direct their learning; someone to spark a flame of curiosity; someone who can be proud of them when they succeed and give them emotional support and encouragement when they fail.  Most of us need a teacher. 

                Technology can enhance learning.  It can make learning exciting and fun, but if a teacher gives students a computer without appropriate direction, the student zips to  bored.com  to play mindless games.  Students need teachers who are passionate about their subjects, who can instill in them a love of learning.  Computers or any other electronic gadget cannot do that.  Anyone who has a teenage child who is texting under the table at dinner can tell you that technology used incorrectly can alienate teenagers more than it can connect them with others.  If you look at the suicide rates among teenagers, or the violent crimes in schools, the last thing our society needs is more alienated young people.  There are far too many deaths of youths from violence and drug over-doses for us not to recognize that there is a problem with youth alienation. Teachers add the human interaction that all people need to learn and grow into responsible adults. Schools need good quality teachers, not more computers.

                How do we attract the right people to be teachers?  Teaching used to be a highly respected career. States have cut salaries and benefits for years. Media has vilified teachers blaming them for every problem in society.  To attract the right kind of teachers, we need to stop thinking teaching is a short-time career that women waiting to get married settle for. Good teachers take a long time to develop, yet some have implied that a teaching career should last be no longer than seven years and be a stepping stone to another career.  What that really means is states don’t want to be responsible for teachers’ retirement.  That is not a good way to attract the brightest and the best to become educators.  Spending money on lavish building and  bulky microphones to hang around teachers’ neck while teachers’ pay is so low that teachers are in the faculty room begging the water department to not turn off their water or are working two jobs to support their families deters the brightest minds from pursuing a career in education.  Where should states invest their educational dollars? Try high quality teachers.

               

Has Technology Reduced Teachers’ Stress or Increased It?

Has Technology Reduced Teachers’ Stress or Increased It?

            Has technology reduced teachers’ stress levels or increased it?  Teachers are connected twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week with electronic grade books, web pages, social media, text-message programs, and computerized instructional programs.  Although all of these programs increase both communication with parents and instructional effectiveness, does it decrease teachers’ stress levels or increase them? 

            What was teaching like forty years ago?  In February of 1976, I was hired in an inner-city high school to replace a teacher who had decided to move back to the middle school.  In those days, we recorded attendance and grades in roll-books containing many pages of large spread sheets.  Because the school had a large mobile population, students were frequently transferring out and transferring into my classes.  As this happened, my neat little alphabetized roll-books became disordered with students crossed out and others added to the bottom.  This meant I had to recreate my roll-books every quarter to maintain some order.  Of course, in today’s world electronic gradebooks hide students that are no longer enrolled and re-alphabetize students when new ones enroll. 

            To determine a student’s grades in those days, a teacher had to decipher that student’s percentage based on the tests and assignments that were given during his enrollment.  This meant that each student’s grade had to be calculated one at a time.  In today’s world, the electronic grade book does this for teachers every time a score is added.  Furthermore, the parents and students can access their grades through their computer, their smart-phone, or have text messages or emails sent to them regularly.  The old roll-book could not do that.

            What happened when the roll-book got lost or stolen?  It did happen.  It happened to me my first year of teaching.  I left my roll-book on the corner of my desk, locked my door and went to supervise a pep rally.  When I returned, my door was still locked, but my roll-book was gone.  Years later, a former student confessed to me the details of this crime.  Three students came to my room during the pep rally.  One of them stood as look-out; one of them unscrewed the vent in the bottom of the door; and the third crawled through the opening, retrieved the roll-book and crawled back.  Afterwards, they replaced the vent and its screws, took the roll-books three miles from the school to the Arctic Circle Dive-In Restaurant.  Next, they dug a hole behind the parking lot, threw the roll book into the hole, poured gasoline on it, and lit it ablaze.  Afterwards, they buried the ashes.  Quite an elaborate plot to get rid of the roll book, but as a novice teacher its loss sent me into a panic.  I asked my principal what I should do.  He suggested that I say nothing.  If I knew my students well enough, I should be able to estimate their grades.  I did and not a single student or parent questioned me about them. 

            I was not the only teacher to have their roll-book stolen.  The science teacher managed a movie theater at night to supplement his income.  One night at the end of quarter, he put a pile of uncorrected tests and his roll-book into a briefcase.  After his shift at the movie theater, he was locking up with briefcase in hand when a robber, thinking he was taking home the nightly receipts from the movie theater, pushed a gun in his back and demanded the briefcase.  The teacher gave it to him knowing how disappointed the thief would be when he discovered the uncorrected tests and the roll-book.  In today’s world if a student or a thief were to take a teachers’ roll-book (if they indeed had one) it would not matter.  If their school was to burn to the ground and all of the teachers’ computers were destroyed, it would not matter, because all of the grades are backed up on the cloud and no one really knows where that is.  

            Obviously, electronic grade books make grading easier and safer, but is it less stressful for teachers? The constant connection between parents and school has created many helicopter parents.  As these parents become more demanding, the stress level for teachers increases.   For example, at the end of seventh period one afternoon, one mother was waiting outside my door anxiously inquiring whether her daughter, Elizabeth, had turned in her assignment that period since she did not see it on the grading program.  I had to explain to this parent that I have to actually read the assignments before assigning them a grade or entering that grade into the electronic grade book. Since I taught seven periods (not six periods with consultation like I had 40 years ago) with 40 students in each class period, I had to read 280 papers before I could record the grades.  In another instance, on a Friday I had collected all 280 of my ninth grade students’ ten-page research papers and had gone home for the weekend.  About midnight, my husband went into Sudden Cardiac Arrest.  Needless to say during that next week while I sat next to my husband in intensive care watching him in his drug induced coma, the papers were not a high priority; nevertheless, I was bombarded with angry emails demanding to know when their son or daughter’s paper would be corrected and recorded on the grading program.  Electronic grade books are easier and improve communication, but I can’t say they reduce stress.

            Other applications that have vastly improved communication between parents and teachers include: school and teacher web sites, Twitter, Facebook, and Remind 101 Scholastic Read 180, Accelerated Reader, Scholastic Reading Inventory Test, STAR, My Access Writing Program and many others improve instruction and allow teachers to evaluate students’ learning and individualize instruction. 

            Facebook and Twitter may allow student to access their teacher with particular questions about assignments, but also can create problems for teachers.  For example, I heard of one teacher who posted a picture of her enjoying a beer in the Beer Gardens in Germany during a summer vacation on her personal Facebook page.  When she returned to school the next fall, she was fired because a parent saw the picture and felt it was inappropriate for a teacher to be seen drinking alcohol.  Be very careful with social media. Make sure you have very restrictive security and be cautious about what you post.  If you use it to communicate with students make sure you are only communicating about how to complete an assignment.  Keep it very professional or it can create issues.  A better choice is Remind 101 which allows you to text reminders about assignments to parents and students, but they cannot respond to them.  If students or parent needs to communicate with you, they can still talk to you in class or email you.  

            Although technology improves communication and the quality of instruction, it adds extra work for teachers.  As a teacher, I usually arrive an hour early to answer emails, update my web site, sent out text messages on Remind 101, and update the agenda on my classroom white board.  After school each day, I stay an hour to respond to writing on My Access, enroll new students in Accelerated Reading, and update my grades on our electronic grade book.  It is like the laundry; if you don’t keep up, it will overwhelm you. 

            Teaching can be a stressful job.  Teachers need to take a break from it once and while, so learn where the off- button is on your computer.  Don’t always take it home with you. Don’t put your school email on your smart phone and know when to leave that computer at school.  When you need a break, take one. My dear Aunt Fae, once told me about a teacher she had an Onequa Elementary School who 70 years ago.  She told me how “Old Lady Kennelly pulled off her wig, and as bald as an eagle ran around the school and swung about the tricky bars.  Don’t be “Old Lady Kennely.”  A relaxed, happy teacher is a better teacher.

Corporation Created Computer Generated Tests or the Human Touch

Corporation Created Computer Generated Tests or the Human Touch

     In the 1920’s large corporations began buying up family farms in the Midwest and running them at factory speeds to ramp productivity using and reusing land to produce crops.  The result was the dust bowl.  Today corporations are taking over education.  Corporation created computer-generated tests are not an effective solution for schools, because first, they are costly; second, they make teaching less of a creative act, so schools are less likely to attract the best qualified teachers; and third, they bore intellectually-gifted students and worse yet they increase the anxiety of struggling students.  

                 These companies create weekly test to collect data and based on a student's performance assign computer-generated drills to maximize students’ performance on computer-generated assessments.  In fact, an entire industry has emerged to write common core tests, practice tests and teaching materials.  These corporations are getting rich on this new legislation.  Lucrative contracts with states and school districts are earning these companies a fortune while teachers’ salaries are stagnant.

                Teaching has never been a well-paid career, but has always had the benefits of interaction with children and a creative release when developing new ways to reach those students.  More teachers were like starving artist, because they enjoyed both the students and inventing new avenues to reach those students.  Since the corporations have taken over, more and more of the creative aspects of teaching, good teachers are leaving the profession and fewer creative new teachers are joining.  It is true that these testing programs can improve the teaching of those incompetent teachers who provide students with film festivals, rather than actually teaching, but they critically hamper the teaching of talented, creative teachers.  Basically they reduce teaching to a paste pudding.  

                Just like the soil in the Midwest that lost all of its nutrients from over use has a negative impact; our students are going to lose all of their motivation to learn.  Worse is what they do to the struggling at-risk students, because it removes the human factor. There is a high correlation between the students who do poorly on the tests and those with poor attendance or poor attitudes.  According the PBS program, Frontline,  “Omarina’s Story” , students who miss 20% or more of the days during any quarter, receive a failing grade in any of their core classes or an unsatisfactory citizenship grade in any core class are 75% more likely to drop out of high school.  They also found that intervening with these students during the middle grades improved their likelihood of graduating. These are the students who are already suffering anxiety because of outside pressures.  These are also the students who are failing the state standardized tests.  

       How do we really solve the problem?   To solve this problem teachers and administrators need to ask “why” these students are absent and intervene to help them solve their problem.  For example, Ted, one of my past students, communicated to me that his mother had abandoned the family, his father had lost his job and the family was homeless.  He often didn’t come to school because his clothing was dirty and ragged and he did not even have a place to shower or brush his teeth.  I discussed this information with his other teachers and the gym teachers offered to allow him to shower and brush his teeth in the gym before school.  Another member of the team picked up a few outfits for the boy at the Good Will.  The gym teacher agreed to wash them for when he washed the football uniforms.   Ted’s attendance improved and so did his grades.  If a student like Ted is bombarded by weekly tests in every core class and suffers failure after failure on computerized tests, he will become more anxious and instead of helping him become successful, he will drop out.

                Other problems are not as simple and may manifest themselves in other ways than poor attendance.  For example, a student may have lost a parent, been physically or sexually abused, or is suffering from a custody battle.  All of these students are in highly anxious states and may act out or have poor attitudes.  Adding more pressure is not helping them.  For example, another student, Lasandra, a bright girl, but an angry one was not performing as well as could be expected.  The school where I was teaching had developed a program, “Century Club,” where teachers identified students like Lasandra, enrolled them in honors classes, and  a small study skills class for added support.  That was my class.  One morning arriving early, as is my custom, I found Lasandra waiting outside my classroom.  She wanted to talk.  She shared her story.  Lasandra had been living with her mother, a heroin addict, in Florida with four other siblings.  To supply herself with drugs, her mother regularly would bring men home and allowed them to have sex with Lasandra, then eleven.  On top of the countless incidences of sexual abuse, her mother would disappear for days at a time leaving Lasandra to care and feed her four younger siblings.  Her mother’s absences continued to be more frequent and longer.  Eventually, after an absence of two weeks, food supplies were depleted and the rent was due.  Desperate, Lasandra called her aunt in another town.  The aunt came, picked up all the children and contacted each child’s biological father to take custody of his child.  Apparently, each child had a different father; thus they were all separated.  Lasandra was sent to live with a father she had never met in California.  Although she was apprehensive about her father as her mother had painted a grim picture of him, she was more concerned about the fate of her mother and worried about her siblings for whom she had cared.  Luckily, for Lasandra her father and new step-mother were caring parents who after hearing Lasandra’s story got her counseling and helped her contact her siblings.  Nevertheless, imagine burdening such a child with repeated failures one computer generated tests.  It would only increase her anxiety instead of motivating her to learn.

                These types of problems are in every school and every social-economic level.  For example, Juanita's father required dialysis twice a week. Fearing deportation her mother took all of the children out of school to sit with husband.  The children got further and further behind.  She too would be over burdened with the added pressure of these computer generated tests.

                 Schools are not factories and teachers are not robots.  To improve education we need to identify the students who are struggling, learn why they are struggling and give them the tools and resources to help them overcome their difficulties.  If we spend our resources working systematically to solve the problems of these students instead of lining the pockets of corporate America, we will not only lower our drop-out rates, but increase the number of students who are empowered to succeed in life.  The human touch is important.  Fertilize our fields and let our children grow, one child at a time, not the corporate giants.  Do you want to know why America’s schools are behind the European schools?  Take a closer look at each child and don’t let them become the next dust bowl.