After 21 years on the job Alabama's one time teacher of the year quits after being told she is unqualified.

Ann Marie Corgill

Courtesy of the Independent:  

A veteran Teacher of the Year in Alabama has resigned after 21 years in the classroom after local authorities told her she is unqualified to educate fifth graders. 

Ann Marie Corgill was told by the Alabama Department of Education that her qualifications were not up to scratch, despite being 2015 National Teacher of the Year and 2014-2015 Alabama Teacher of the Year finalist. She is also the author of teaching book called “Of Primary Importance”. 

Ms Corgill said she was tired of having to prove herself and did not want to pay more fees, and sent Birmingham City Schools a letter of resignation. In the letter, first obtained by Al.com, she wrote: 

“After 21 years of teaching in grades 1-6, I have no answers as to why this is a problem now, so instead of paying more fees, taking more tests and proving once again that I am qualified to teach, I am resigning.”

You know what, I don't even know enough curse words to express my anger over this.

What in the hell are we doing?

How can we have broken public education so completely that even gifted, experienced teachers can no longer function adequately in our classrooms?

This, THIS, is what the conservatives have been working towards all along.

They want to drive good teachers away, undermine public education until it is crippled, and then declare that the Department of Education has failed, and do away with it completely.

Despite the bullshit rhetoric about "fixing" education, this was the driving force behind No Child Left Behind. And the damage it caused, and the damage still being caused by those trying to modify it, is cheating our kids out of their rights as citizens to a free, and comprehensive, education.

Teaching is not a cookie cutter profession. These are not factory workers going through the same mundane tasks over an over for a paycheck.

They are intelligent, imaginative individuals, with skills and dedication who do best when they are allowed to experiment and think outside of the box.

That is how they keep the children engaged, and how they keep things fresh and non-repetitive for themselves.

The best teachers I have seen are the ones that rarely provide instruction the same way twice. They think of new and exciting ways to keep the material interesting and sometimes even entertaining.

Yet that diversity is exactly what is being punished in American classrooms today.

And you know what? That is fucked up.

Perhaps the most articulate nine year old you will ever see speaks out against school testing in Florida.

Okay for the record I would just like to admit that I am not that articulate now much less than when I was in the fourth grade.

Her name is Sydney Smoot, and she is speaking in front of the Hernando County School Board. Here is more on her story: 

"This test defines me as a number," she said, holding up an index finger for emphasis. "One test defines me as either a failure or a success." 

She questioned the merit of the exam that has been subjected to little vetting: 

"Why am I being forced to take a test that hasn't even been tested on students in Florida?" 

And she had a particular objection that brought all her other ones to a head. 

Before taking the reading section of the FSA last week, she was required to sign a form that prohibited her from talking about its contents, even to her parents. 

Jennifer Smoot, her mother, said her daughter came home upset because she felt as though this form kept her from sharing the burden of her testing anxieties with her parents. 

"My daughter talks to me about everything," said Smoot, 38. "She was very upset."

I am a little late to this story as it happened over a week ago, but once I saw that video I knew I had to share it here.

As many of you know I am firmly against most of the standardized testing that resulted from No Child Left Behind, but I don't believe I ever expressed myself with near the eloquence of nine year old Sydney Smoot.

Take my word for it, this will not be the last time we hear from this young lady.

Florida lawmaker: Common Core will turn your children gay. Wait, what?

Courtesy of Think Progress:  

Common Core may not be a well-intentioned set of improved educational standards, as supporters would have you believe, but instead a trojan horse designed to turn every schoolchild in Florida, if not America, gay. 

This ominous warning came at an anti-Common Core event in March courtesy of Florida State Rep. Charles Van Zant (R). Speaking at the “Operation Education Conference” in Orlando, Van Zant warned that officials implementing Common Core in Florida are “promoting as hard as they can any youth that is interested in the LGBT agenda.” 

Their aim, Van Zant warned, was to “attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can.” He then apologized to the crowd for having to be the bearer of bad news. “I really hate to bring you that news,” the Florida Republican said, “but you need to know.

You know I am not exactly a cheerleader for Common Core, I have some concerns. 

However you have to be an incredibly under educated buffoon to think that education can alter a person's sexuality.

And speaking of education, exactly what kind of a sentence is "attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can?"

It seems to me that this dipshit would benefit from furthering his education. And if that education turns him gay, then all the better. 

We lose yet another teacher.

February 12, 2014 

I am writing today to let you know that I am resigning my position as PreK and Kindergarten teacher in the Cambridge Public Schools. It is with deep sadness that I have reached this decision, as I have loved my job, my school community, and the families and amazing and dedicated faculty I have been connected with throughout the district for the past eighteen years. I have always seen myself as a public school teacher, and fully intended to work until retirement in the public school system. Further, I am the product of public schools, and my son attended Cambridge Public Schools from PreK through Grade 12. I am and always have been a firm believer in quality public education. 

In this disturbing era of testing and data collection in the public schools, I have seen my career transformed into a job that no longer fits my understanding of how children learn and what a teacher ought to do in the classroom to build a healthy, safe, developmentally appropriate environment for learning for each of our children. I have experienced, over the past few years, the same mandates that all teachers in the district have experienced. I have watched as my job requirements swung away from a focus on the children, their individual learning styles, emotional needs, and their individual families, interests and strengths to a focus on testing, assessing, and scoring young children, thereby ramping up the academic demands and pressures on them. Each year, I have been required to spend more time attending classes and workshops to learn about new academic demands that smack of 1st and 2nd grade, instead of Kindergarten and PreK. I have needed to schedule and attend more and more meetings about increasingly extreme behaviors and emotional needs of children in my classroom; I recognize many of these behaviors as children shouting out to the adults in their world, “I can’t do this! Look at me! Know me! Help me! See me!” I have changed my practice over the years to allow the necessary time and focus for all the demands coming down from above. Each year there are more. Each year I have had less and less time to teach the children I love in the way I know best—and in the way child development experts recommend. I reached the place last year where I began to feel I was part of a broken system that was causing damage to those very children I was there to serve. 

I was trying to survive in a community of colleagues who were struggling to do the same: to adapt and survive, to continue to hold onto what we could, and to affirm what we believe to be quality teaching for an early childhood classroom. I began to feel a deep sense of loss of integrity. I felt my spirit, my passion as a teacher, slip away. I felt anger rise inside me. I felt I needed to survive by looking elsewhere and leaving the community I love so dearly. I did not feel I was leaving my job. I felt then and feel now that my job left me. 

It is with deep love and a broken heart that I write this letter. 

Sincerely, Suzi Sluyter

For the reason why this fine, dedicated professional felt the need to walk away from  a 25 year career, click here.

The level of training that was asked her, and the constant requirements to test even kindergarten children, essentially drained her to the point that she could no longer do the job that she loved so very much.

This is happening all over the country.

In other words the conservative goal of destroying public education in this country is succeeding.

And we should be ashamed of ourselves for letting it happen.

The propaganda against public education.

Courtesy of HuffPo and written by Diane Ravitch:  

A few years ago, when I was blogging at Education Week with Deborah Meier, a reader introduced the term FUD. I had never heard of it. It is a marketing technique used in business and politics to harm your competition. The term and its history can be found on Wikipedia. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. The reader said that those who were trying to create a market-based system to replace public education were using FUD to undermine public confidence in public education. They were selling the false narrative that our public schools are obsolete and failing. 

This insight inspired me to write Reign of Error to show that the "reform" narrative is a fraud. Test scores on NAEP are at their highest point in history for white students, black students, Hispanic students, and Asian students. Graduation rates are the highest in history for these groups. The dropout rate is at an historic low point. 

Why the FUD campaign against one of our nation's most treasured democratic institutions? It helps the competition. It makes people so desperate that they will seek out unproven alternatives. It makes the public gullible when they hear phony claims about miracle schools, where everyone graduates and everyone gets high test scores, and everyone goes to a four-year college. No such school exists. The "miracle school" usually has a high suspension rate, a high expulsion rate, a high attrition rate, and such schools usually do not replace the kids they somehow got rid of. Some "miracle schools" have never graduated anyone because they have only elementary schools, but that doesn't stop the claims and boasting. 

There is no evidence from any other nation that replacing a public system with a privatized choice system produces anything but social, economic, and racial segregation.

There is nothing that angers me quite as much as watching this undermining of our education system and the attacks on our teachers. 

The assault has come from numerous points of attack. Reducing taxes that fund education, promoting charter schools, insults leveled at the teaching profession, and of course NCLB and standardized testing, which has nothing to do with improving education, and everything to do with sabotaging and ultimately ending government run public education.

The only thing that will stop this, and it has been going on for decades now, is to provide our teachers with the freedom to actually teach. We need to provide the materials, and the training, and then sit back and watch the magic.

Some of the best teaching I have every witnessed was provided by teachers who were excited about their jobs, and could perform it without the administration breathing down their necks, and without the pendulum of constant, unnecessary testing hanging over their heads.

Public education was not broken, until those who claimed to be trying to fix it, broke it. 

How Charter schools keep test scores high. By eliminating those children who do not perform at the desired standards.

Courtesy of Wait, What?:  

Achievement First, Inc. the Charter School management company that runs more than two dozen schools in New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island is notorious for “out-migrating” or “dumping” any students that don’t fit their “exacting” standards. 

While Achievement First likes to brag that their students do better on standardized tests than students in their neighboring district schools, they fail to reveal that the get those results by refusing to provide educational services to broad social-demographic groups within the community. In virtually every situation, Achievement First educates students that are less poor and they fail to take on their fair share of students who face English language barriers or need special education services. 

The harsh discipline program, which they start at the kindergarten level, is just one example of how Achievement First forces students out of their “public” charter schools. 

Although they claim to be “public” educational institutions, and are in fact funded with taxpayer dollars, no genuine public school would ever try or get away with the dubious education policies and practices that Achievement First engages in. 

In the latest news story about the massive number of suspensions of children aged six and under, the Hartford Courant looked at the data that was released last week by Connecticut’s Child Advocate. 

While suspensions were shockingly high in some urban areas, the magnitude of suspensions was the most extreme at the charter schools run by Achievement First, the charter school management company that was co-founded by Stefan Pryor, Governor Malloy’s Commissioner of Education. 

As the Hartford Courant reported over the weekend; 

“The incidence of suspension of kindergartners and first graders at Achievement First Hartford Academy last year was an estimated nine times the rate in Hartford public schools. 

Put another way, an estimated 11.7 percent of kindergartners and first-graders at Achievement First Hartford Academy were suspended last year an average of 5.4 times each. In the Hartford public school system, 3.3 percent of kindergartners and first-graders were suspended an average of 2.1 times.”

Now remember these are Kindergartners and First Graders we are talking about here. Children at the VERY beginning of their educational journey who are suspended in order to create a disciplinary record with whihc the school can then expel the student a year or two later, or create an atmosphere in which the parent become fed up and voluntarily removes their child helping the Charter school to keep those artificially inflated test scores and use them to advertise themselves as being more successful than the public school system.

Oh, and don't forget that our tax dollars pay them to victimize our children in such a manner.

And where does that now disenfranchised child end up? Right back in the public school system where he is now labeled as a troubled youth and has had the idea of education poisoned in his mind. Now it is up to the underpaid public school teachers to "fix" them.

You know I worked in the public school classroom for three years, and when we had children with behavioral problems we met with their parents and provided supports and sometimes a modified curriculum to meet that child's needs. Early interventions often meant that they were able to be more successful as they continued their journey through academia.

I only remember one child in the Kindergarten room I worked in being suspended and that was for striking another child with an object and hurting them on purpose. And THAT little boy came back and successfully finished Kindergarten as well as the rest of his  time in elementary school.

You know, because for us it was NOT all about test scores. For us it was about the children.

Remember them?

The impact of standardized testing in public schools.

This is exactly how it feels to constantly have the threat of losing your job, or having your funding pulled, resting on the performance of a child who for various reasons may not be capable of meeting the testing standards.

Oh, and don't forget kids, school should be fun.

I don't think I have ever seen a more accurate depiction of childhood in America today.

Gone are the imaginative romps enjoyed by yesterday's children.

Today's children are mesmerized by electronics. medicated into compliance, and tested to exhaustion.