The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports public school enrollment in the city has fallen to its lowest level since 1894.
In the comments section, one reader who claims to be a Cleveland public school teacher responds. I repost it here exactly as it appears there:
As a proud teacher for the CMSD I would like to give the readers an idea of what our children see on a daily basis. I am assuming most of you have not ever seen someone be killed right in front of you, our kids have. I bet most of you feel safe in your homes at night when you lay in your beds, our kids do not. As adults, we often struggle with juggeling a career and parenthood, and our students struggle with single parenthood and remaining a good student. Many of our students come hungry, are abused, raise themselves and sibblings, and much more. I am a union member who is all for evaluating teachers on how well they make connections with students, conduct their classrooms, present interactive lessons, but not how well a student does on one day of test. I would love to be “paid what I am worth” as on response said. I have a BA and two Masters degrees and I work everyday with students many of the readers who run from if they saw them in their neighborhoods. How much is that worth? I am at school each day with these kids and if I was not, they would be on a bus on their way to your towns…which would be fine with me…would it with you? I am not asking for more money, I am asking for social service help and help for my studnets to deal with the very tragic things they see daily. I don’t care if we have 120,00 students or 10 these kids deserve the help they are desprately crying out for.
We all make mistakes, and an Internet comment is not exactly a formal letter, but if you want to persuasively argue about public education, you should at least make a better attempt at proofreading. I count 15-18 spelling and grammatical errors in that paragraph.
Perhaps this teacher’s students really are walking through battlefields to get to school. Is the trip worth it?
The writter may have been rattled or exhausted when she wrote it, so I can certainly understand the errors. However, I’ve seen far too much of that kind of thing, and on a fairly regular basis, from teachers in my own state (NC). It makes us all look bad when so many don’t make the effort to present themselves as the professionals they are supposed to be.
And as I hit the ‘submit comment’ button, I realized that extra “t” in “writer” was not just a scratch on my glasses.
This is in the “for what it’s worth” category, which means possibly nothing but here goes anyway. I ran the peice thourh my MS Word Spelling/Grammar checker. Stats at the end estimated that the piece was written at grade level 8.6.
Going to the Plain Dealer article we find this little tid bit, “Many students remain in the city but attend privately run, publicly funded charter schools or go to private schools on state vouchers. More than 25,000 Cleveland children went to charters or used vouchers last year. They took with them more than $100 million in state aid.”
That works out to about $4K a head to educate those children in a manner their parents approve of (else they would not leave them in those schools of choice). Sounds like an incredible bargain to me. Would that every child had such an opportunity!
I wonder how long it’ll be before the relative, and immediate, bargain that charter schools turn out to be becomes a political issue? After all, if the educational outcomes aren’t noticeably different why should the expenditure be?
JoeH wrote: I ran the peice [sic] thourh [sic] my MS Word Spelling/Grammar checker. Stats at the end estimated that the piece was written at grade level 8.6.
Too bad he didn’t run his post through that same MS Word Spelling/Grammar checker. :-)
Jane S
How right you are! Thank you. Face very Red at this moment.
I noticed the spelling/grammar errors, and they didn’t seem to be terribly far beyond what I could chalk up to typos (as several writers above have discovered after posting). But what bothers me–living in another midwestern urban district–is this sort of “my poor students are abused and neglected at home and live lives of violence every day,” which sort of justifies some of the chaos within the buildings, and the low reading scores, the lack of mathematics achievement, the parents who leave the district and the many kids who don’t last until graduation.
Cleveland, I am certain, has many able and caring teachers. But it also has many kids who have parents who are not crack heads and who do care passionately about what their kids are learning (or not). They have also committed a few acts of funny counting (upping their attendance rates by marking kids “present” if someone sent work home for them), and a recent audit of their responsiveness to mental health issues revealed that their counselors were too busy operating a revolving door attendance policy (kids who had 10 consecutive absences were dropped and had to be re-enrolled when they came back) to do anything else (like counseling), despite training in positive behavior support, their discipline policy didn’t support the concept.
Not meaning to pick on Cleveland–same conditions could be found in most urban districts. Heavy on the excuses and the martyrdom to the cause–meanwhile, not quite willing to look within to see what could be fixed, or without, to really get to know families, parents and communities to forge the kinds of relationships that could be helpful.