One of my friends, a colleague at Norman North High School, and fellow NBCT, Dan Nolan, was invited to speak at the press conference marking the 25th anniversary of then-Governor Henry Bellmon signing of HB1017. Dan is a gifted history teacher, and well aware of the ironies facing our profession. I always sent him books about current events, or historical fiction to read for accuracy. I could read for story and character, but Dan understands the deep connections that tie the past to the present, and countries of the world to each other.
I wrote about the broken promises of HB1017 here. The anniversary was bittersweet for many of us who remembered the hope and optimism we all felt.
Here are his remarks. We are lucky to have Dan's eloquence representing all of us.
I am attempting
to reconstruct my speech at the 25th Birthday of HB 1017 conference from
my battered and sweaty 3X5 cards. I’m
sure some of the following wording is clearer or better chosen than my actual
speech but it also lacks the passion of the actual event so I will call it a
draw.
" I was making my
transition from Air Force officer to civilian. One of the things that brought
me to my current profession of teaching was the passion I saw during the
passing of HB 1017. The teacher’s sense
of justice and feeling for a greater good was something that pulled me into public
education and the classroom. I felt I
was going from service to my nation to service to my community. It is twenty-five years since the passing of
HB 1017 and from the perspective of a classroom teacher it is not pretty.
Excessive testing
is negatively impacting our students and the teaching environment. Endless
teaching means no access to computers and writing labs for weeks on end.
Teachers, counselors and administrators are pulled from their jobs of working
with your children and instead end up administering countless tests. The students lose classroom instruction time
and for what? The great irony is that this
testing nightmare was driven by the need for accountability. In my district, and many other districts in
this state, parents have the ability to check their student’s progress on-line
at any time. They can see their
student’s grades and upcoming assignments 24-7.
Parents have the ability to email their student’s teachers at the
parent’s convenience. They also have the
choice of one-to-one contact on teacher conference days, open houses and
individual conferences. You have the
option of a teacher who knows your kid, provides timely and individual
feed-back and cares, or you can spend millions for a drive-by, multiple-choice,
out-of-state, for-profit company.
Lack of funding
results in growing classroom size. I
informally polled my students and this was their number one priority. In the words of one of my students large
classes, “make teachers mean.” She was right; large classes change the
classroom dynamic from one of informality to being reduced to crowd control.
Look at the English teachers’ workloads.
Thirty plus students in five classes at a minimum of five minutes per
essay. (Most spend far longer writing personal feedback.) Do the math; it is
over twelve hours for one assignment. The past semester I had thirty-six
students in a class with 28 seats, what was I supposed to do? Perhaps I could
turn over the stools and sit students on each leg?
Underfunding
results in 1,000 teacher vacancies in our state. Many teachers are simply moving to other
states. I currently work four part-time
jobs to pay for my teaching habit. It is
hard to teach the American Dream when you have lost your own chance to be part
of it. Many teachers are simply falling
out of the middle class.
One of the
reasons for the lack of teachers is the outright vilification of teachers often
led by people with money and influence, but no teaching or educational
background. Ask yourself why a computer
billionaire would declare education broken, and then propose technology and
computers to fix it? Our former Superintendent of Education personally told me
that we had a crisis in education and that India was the model to follow. Has
she ever been to India? That would be the country where they recently published
a picture of scores of parents scaling the side of a high school to pass cheat
sheets for the final examination. I guess Indian style high stakes testing is
the answer.
Personally for me
the final straw was this session’s bill that implied that Advanced Placement
history teachers were not patriotic enough.
On my classroom wall is the picture of my father and his crew chief
before he flew fighter sweep over D Day.
A photo of his headstone at Arlington is next to that. My papers for crossing Communist East Germany
to the island of democracy of Berlin and my picture in an F-16 during my time
of service are also on my classroom wall.
There are thirty years of uniformed military service on that wall and we
are not patriotic enough?
Another blow was
the mismanagement of our National Certification program, in some ways the
closest thing the state has to merit pay.
Our national certification program took teachers with proven best
methods who passed rigorous certification standards and allowed Oklahoma
teachers, such as myself, to attain the highest level of professional
certification in the nation. Our state
support of NBCT made Oklahoma a model state for professional education. We were rated as one of the top states for
the number of teachers who had achieved certification. Our past superintendent pulled money from the
program, diverted funds to pay speech pathologist instead of teachers and
gutted the stipend.
On the
anniversary of 1017 we must look at the course of education in our state and
nation. We are Americans; we can do
better. The battered pickups are again
leaving Oklahoma again, and they are full of teachers."
Dan Nolan NBCT, former Norman Teacher of the Year and
finalist for Oklahoma Teacher of the Year
No comments:
Post a Comment