InsideEd: An Awkard Addiction

I have found myself reading InsideEd on a daily basis - along with the Baltimore Sun's education articles. I am tempted to write about the recent foray of articles about school violence, but I'm unsure I know everything there is to know in order to make any intelligent contribution here. It seems like everyone has an agenda, and the truth is muddled along the way. For instance, I have to question Marietta English's air time. She has been all over broadcast and newsprint media. Isn't there an election coming up? What perfect timing for her. According to WBAL, Nancy Grasmick is calling for a school violence summit. I’m tired of hearing about meetings and not seeing any specific change.

What really, really interested me was Neufeld’s post on zero-basing. She references a study that makes some interesting points on restructuring. One of the findings was that schools with zero-based staffs, as part of their restructuring plan, experienced problems of low staff morale and teachers spending more time focusing on job security issues. Sounds like my school. When a school decides to restructure, they can choose some of the following options: contracting with an outside organization with demonstrated effectiveness operating schools, reopening as a charter, replacing all or most of the staff who are relevant to the failure, turning operation over to the state if the state agrees, and the potpourri category of "any other restructuring of the school's governance that produces fundamental reform."

In my school, one of the ways that we were told restructuring would be developed was through a TCNA (Teacher Capacity Needs Assessment). I was formally trained as TCNA facilitator in my school. Honestly, it was an incredible waste of time for our staff. The idea seems great, but we did not develop possible solutions or explanations for the root causes of failure or success in teaching the Voluntary State Curriculum. Hopefully the results were not used to inform specific strategies per each of the TCNA areas.

So here's the disconnect: I'm confident my school is zero-basing - the school board approved it and now we're waiting on the state. Everyone at my school is concerned about job security, and not knowing what is happening is causing an uneasy atmosphere. Procedures for what teachers need to do have not been outlined, yet the voluntary transfer fair is Monday. What the school is asking of its teachers seems misaligned when relating it to restructuring. So if we are going to be "fired" from our current site because we are ineffective, why are we the ones identifying the root causes in the TCNA? The staff was forced (that was the sentiment of the staff) to forgo their professional development to complete the TCNA. The actual TCNA process itself was a perfect image of a bad teacher handing students a worksheet to complete to keep them quiet and busy without any instruction making it relevant. Did this happen so that teachers just felt involved?

Furthermore, if we are pushing so-called ineffective teachers out of failing schools, why are we okay with them going to other schools in the system?