George,
I agree that salaries are very demoralizing (for teachers and for
administrators attempting to recruit teachers) in many schools right now,
because they are stagnant and non-competitive.
I think that the measuring is very demoralizing too...because measuring
has become confused with accountability.
My impression is that many school systems have lost their way, that their
purpose is obscure and ill-defined. The many stakeholders (governments,
educators, administrators, community members, parents and students) have
demanded so many "purposes" that it becomes nearly impossible to achieve
any of them.
Additionally, meaningful and creative work has become nearly non-existent
in many schools (for students as well as teachers), and autonomy (for both
student/parent and teacher) has become mostly a source of political power
rather than the context in which teaching/learning is experienced.
The combination of inadequate resourcing, mixed purpose and the seemingly
irrelevance of school life from "real" life, along with other factors,
seem to alienate schools further from their communities. This
"disconnection" between community and school then becomes the apparent
problem rather than a symptom.
Would an infusion of dollars into increased salaries, property improvement
and development and new books and tools fix these problems? We've seen
other institutions look to capital infusions as a fix to their problems
(Amtrak, USPS for example) when the real problems were hidden by the
rancor over pay and resources. USPS had to completely reinvent
itself...and hopefully continues to do so.
Learning (and living) systems learn from their feedback and adapt to
survive and remain healthy. What can schools learn from their various
sources of feedback to do the same?
regards,
George jorge Bartow wrote:
> What interests me is that with the move toward accountability has come
> more oversight and control. Many of the newer measures of competency are
> lists and lists of checkpoints that an observer (e.g. principal or
> supervisor) looks for when he/she visits a class. The low salaries add up
> to a very demoralizing situation.
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