I’m a veteran public school educator with more than 25 years’ experience working with high-risk youth. It’s not an impossible job, but not possible without a dynamic leadership team championing the way. We must ask ourselves, if the current leadership team hasn’t demonstrated measured improvement in the past decade, may we expect a positive curve in the next decade?
I work at Southwest Middle School which is a part of the Sweetwater Union High School District. My school, which is located near the International border with Tijuana, MX, is one of the lowest academic performing middle schools in San Diego County. On average, our middle school students read at a 3rd grade level. Unfortunately, this achievement gap will only continue to widen during the COVID 19 pandemic, due partly to poor leadership within our educational community.
I’m a dynamic individual that has traveled extensively around the world. I get excited and like to share my journeys and stories to those who are interested. I want my students to see this in me and be excited about life as much as I am.
I’m currently learning to skydive and will be receiving my license within the next two weeks. I recently talked about this with school administrators. I shared that the training at the skydiving school is professional and the instructors are seasoned masters at their craft. Makes sense I thought considering the potential consequences that poor curriculum and instruction could bring… speaking of skydiving. This gave me pause to think. I thought about the training that teachers are currently receiving now that our teaching medium is 100% online.
It has been difficult to transition to a more online teaching environment. I didn’t receive much training from the SUHSD beyond being given a list of online tutorials to access. Getting most of the students to participate has been especially challenging. Personally, I believe my students are a whole lot more important than learning to skydive. The consequences of poor instruction may not be immediate as say poor skydiving curriculum and instruction, but the consequences are just as dire in the long run I argue.
I posed a question, or more of a statement, to my administrators. If the level of instruction at my skydiving school was at the same level as the online instructor training we’re receiving here, I’m a 100% certain I’d be dead by now! Although their response was something like a “deer in headlights,” they most likely knew I was not exaggerating. When pleading for help, the typical response that I received was “I will get back to you,” which only happened on one occasion. My district email continues to fill up with more training videos, which I could easily locate myself on YouTube. This is what leadership calls “support.” I was forced to post an ad on Craigslist for help and am now paying a teacher in New Zealand to teach me via Zoom, the programs that I need to use to help my students succeed.
The SUHSD hired a couple of UC San Diego professors in a Zoom meeting attended by more than 700 district teachers. These professors used “flowery” terminology and the “new” buzz words in education talking about Bloom’s Taxonomy of Higher Level Teaching. Unfortunately, many of the teachers in the training program did not even know how to use the online training programs that the district was requiring them to utilize within a couple of days of the online launch.
It’s easy to understand why American students continue to perform so low on the International PISA test, an important test given to 15 year olds in over 70 countries. Top performing PISA countries like China, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Finland and even Vietnam, when having to make a choice, always invest heavily in the “capacity of the teacher” vs smaller class sizes and more digital widgets that you see in U.S. schools. Even Vietnam’s 10% most disadvantaged students perform better than the average American student on the PISA test.
I recently talked with some of my friends who are in the upper socioeconomic class. They along with some of their friends are forming “pandemic cohorts” made up of 10-12 students of their children’s similar age and are each paying $300 a week per child. They are hiring credentialed teachers to teach cohorts in their homes. Not only do they understand the value of teacher centric education, they also understand the lifetime consequences of a low quality online education. The people with financial resources will move their children forward academically during this pandemic, while the parents of the children that I teach have little choice but to accept what is given to them.
Since teaching my students online for three weeks, I was shocked to learn that 100% of my students are bored at home and want to return back to school to be with their friends. Even they have had enough time away and seem a lot more motivated to learn on campus. With San Diego having one of the best climates in the world, maybe the Governor will consider other learning options like teaching outdoors in a covered area.
At the very least, all teachers and support staff should have to return to their school site and teach every day from their classrooms. This could be done safely and would make it much easier for teachers to collaborate with their colleagues as well as increase communication along all fronts to help our students succeed. There are just too many distractions at home and teachers need to be in a “professional” environment to do their best.
COVID 19 has certainly unmasked the US healthcare system. The so-called “greatest healthcare system in the world” is every bit as ineffective as those in the poorest countries of the world. Unfortunately, COVID has also unmasked the U.S. public educational system, driven by ineffective leadership, inequities and poor student performance.
