21st Century School Teacher

It’s that time of year again: the time of year when teachers across America start sweating it, anxious because soon they will see how their students fared on last year’s state exams.  The time of year when teachers remember their students as standardized test scores… And the scores are coming in, whether we like them or not…  While I was thinking about this today, I remembered that the public school advocacy group Center on Education Policy released a new report earlier this summer,” Has Student Achievement Increased Since 2002?”  The report confirms achievement has increased, but this report fails to reference trends measured in the PISA or the PIRLS international tests--that both show a U.S. decline in every subject since they began testing in 2000.  What is really happening to education in America? 

It’s hard to get the facts straight; there are many scores to tabulate and variables to correlate—has No Child Left Behind helped to deliver a significant gain in student achievement, or the opposite, as some suggest--actually slowed student achievement since that law’s passage?  It’s difficult to speculate on such a complicated issue, but I’d like to weigh in…

IMHO I believe that teachers carry NCLB legislation like an albatross around their necks… They are busier than ever before.  Why?  Because they are trying to balance teaching-to-the-test and teaching to enrich students’ lives.  And add to that, teachers are also working to incorporate 21st century skills into their curricula. Teachers know that the curricula is not complete for 21st century learners, and the tests that states have spent years designing to measure sets of standards don’t even address many of the skills that will be needed when students move into the real landscape of our global world…

It’s time for bold moves in education… It's also time to look students in the eyes and acknowledge their patience… (That’s my lead in to a great video posted on Youtube and Classrooms 2.0  ;)  -where I first watched it…)

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