whats going on in the county

As I opened the Baltimore Sun’s website today I read that there was an audit conducted on Baltimore County Public schools and results revealed that teacher training lacked proper programs protocol. This shortcoming ‘has perpetuated a minority achievement gap that could take 50 years to close’ according the to article. Upon further reading it revealed that the majority of teachers felt uncomfortable implementing computers into their curriculum even though the teacher to computer ratio is 1:6 of the teachers they visited. Clearly my issue from this article, and the cry of every Baltimore City public teacher is, “When will our turn come?” I am unsure as to the auditing process of Baltimore city, and if it has an auditing process. They discuss the disparity between passing scored in Baltimore city as 35.5 percent, but what about my school that can only pass 18% of its students on the HSA in Biology? Reading articles like these somehow angers me because the idea that we get the short end of the stick is thrown in my face. Maybe there are audits in Baltimore city, but it seems to that as soon as the city or an individual school proposes and implements a project it is abandoned after positive results fail to peak in a short amount of time. It is just a frustrating time for me because at this point in time working for my school teachers are expected to do everything without being told anything. Little planning is involved to execute an HSA mastery course after school, while administrators argue over the type of food to serve to the students, rather than determine times, dates, objectives and other logistical needs. As I sit in the conference room, I can see why so many schools lack organization. Time management is a skill to have when running a school, yet administrators allow minutes to pass by without facilitating a conversation or realizing the same point has been made four different ways by four different people. I wonder about this…

It is true that teaching training is an issue, but in BCPSS an audit would simply show that teacher quality is down. There are teachers teaching subjects to which they are not highly qualified or even knowledgeable in, and PIP’s only go as far as a post-observation conference with no improvement plan laid out by the administration. Let’s take the first step in holding administrators accountable for their teachers, and teachers accountable for quality teaching.