Creation of a Day to do Grades

One year when the district had no money, two important contract changes were made to facilitate a contract agreement.

One of these was a paid day at the end of each semester to work on grades. Today is the such a day. The other important part of the contract change was the establishment of professional day. This allows teachers to do their school homework at home. If there are no students at school to be served, or a meeting scheduled (cannot be abused) then teachers are permitted to leave campus and do their professional work anywhere they want. There is no "you must not check out by a certain time." or "you must stay until a certain time." This was a reason why I switched over from county service to high school service. Along with in service and computer possibilities the high school teaching group looked more appealing than the cramped position the county schools are continually face.

The adoption of the Aries grade book for many teachers has mitigated the acceptance to this professional day. Teachers must be hooked up to a school computer to enter grades. They cannot do this at home because of the lack of protected servers of sufficiant speed to do this. Weekly as well as end of the quarter and semester grades. This means that teachers must check in with their grades today or the first day back to school to meet the computer deadlines for entering grades.

Another mitigating element is the use of district wide finals. In many subject matter areas there are now district adopted finals. Edusoft is the company that produces the software that allows the district and the ability to disaggregate which questions are difficult for students within a given classroom and withing a given school or within a given district for the purposes of focusing on those areas that need to be supported. Right now each student's final is scanned and graded by a program that enters each answer into the districts computer. There are over 10,000 students in this district and growing. Add this to pacing calendars and state and district objectives and you have a whole different animal in the district teaching core that occurred just a few years ago. Is it better? I don't know.

The district is hellbent on changing our contract to reflect these changes. And the teachers' responsibilities to accomplish these activities. We are reluctant to change because it institutes No child left behind and that could and should change significantly when cooler heads prevail. We are losing many students a dropouts due to an uninteresting curriculum, the loss of elective classes and focus on passing the test. What is the social cost of that? Does it matter that in an impoverished area like ours, we have not developed work habits for life long learning? I have a feeling that our freedom to make oneself better has been thwarted by such lofty academic goals. How many students do you have in AP classes? One school has 600 out of 2700 students. Will we have a glut of engineers and a dearth of teachers electricians and plumbers? What since can be made of this? Is this what we want? Do wee need to get everyone literate? That might be a better goal. Even some of them may not make it. We need to understand that too.

Too many questions not enough time.. Pat