The Future of Education

But despite my worries about how I'm going to make my future income, let me tell you why I am NOT depressed about quitting:

• Next year our school district will go from receiving $35 per student, to receiving $15 per student. That means much less supplies for same amount of students. Probably pretty much less of everything.
• Teachers will soon be evaluated based on their student's scores which has been proven by many studies as a bad method. After all, some students, no matter how much you water the bamboo, won't succeed. Whether due to learning disabilities, or a lack of motivation, or some other outside factor that you just can't control.
• And this new way of evaluation means even more testing for students. As though the district's quarterly assessments, the toolkits, the DIBELs testing, the STAR testing, the AR testing, the Standford 10/AIMs test and my own little assessments do not already take away enough learning time from our students- let's do more testing! Good plan.
• My student's that I worked so HARD with last year tested back into the program (which means their scores went down). It's too depressing to see that and I would rather be naive to it and think they are being equally successful with their new teachers.
• Art is likely to be cut which will make some of my amazing artistic students very sad, which would make me very sad, which would just be sad. Plus regular teachers will then have one less day of prep. time (since their kids won't be going to art) and that can make a teacher very cranky.

It will be good to get some distance from all these sad changes to education but sadly, Steven will be in school sooner then I think and then they will be staring me down again. It is enough to make one consider homeschooling...