Within the first eight hours of my new teaching position, I thought of leaving the profession. And not of leaving in the next five years, but of leaving tomorrow. I cursed under my breath, sent angry text messages to my wife, and went hunting immediate job openings in other districts, in full-time tutoring, and in educational publishing—anything so that I could get away from here.
The reason for all of this hand-wringing and soul-searching was that I had been told to help implement a regimented and standardized test-prep curriculum, euphemistically named Success For All.
Luckily, after all of that I also called a trusted colleague or two to commiserate and ask for advice. This helped, if only because it allowed me to place my panic within the proper context. If I needed the job and wanted to stay in the profession, then I could find ways to exercise my autonomy. If I wanted to learn and grow, I had to stay. I walked into school the next day somewhat calmed, and ready to try my best to engage the thing that had briefly driven me toward madness.
When I accepted a full-time job teaching middle school Language Arts (at the same district where I’d served as a long-term substitute at the high school last year), I had been told by the head of Human Resources that I would help to implement a new reading program.
“OK,” I said, “that’s not a problem,” not realizing that the program was in fact The Foundation, and that The Foundation’s model would tether me to a day-by-day, minute-by-minute, word-by-word script. In hindsight, I should have asked more questions.
The Success For All Foundation was begun in 1986 by—among others—Dr. Robert Slavin, an educational researcher at Johns Hopkins University. The Foundation’s stated goal is to raise the reading and math scores of the nation’s poorest students. By the time I was hired to teach middle school, my district had already implemented SFA in all of its elementary schools. This model in fact permeated all subjects, but especially targeted language arts and math.
[The manner in which the district imposed SFA on its schools, administrations, teachers, and students deserves its own review, which at the moment I lack the time to undertake myself.]
Two months into the Success For All model, and I’m still feeling overwhelmed by the amount of fluff (the points systems, the team scoresheets, the different codified edu-babble terms) that I have to sort through in order to get to the core of what the program is designed to do, and that’s improving students’ reading and writing skills. In particular, improving them apropos of excelling on mandated state standardized tests. And there’s the kicker: this is test prep, and there’s no way to deny that.
Now some might furrow their brows and ask blankly, “Well, what’s wrong with that?” And the answer is, nothing, so long as this is your end-goal for kids. But this isn’t my goal for my students, nor for my own child. I want to be a teacher who helps create citizens, not workers. For me, education should be about personal and social liberation, not only personal utility.
There are things that I like about this program, including its reliance on teamwork, and the open study and discussion of basic reading strategies. As one retiring teacher admonished her colleagues on the last day of the 2015/16 school year, I’m striving to take what’s good about the program, and leave the rest alone.
But that doesn’t stop me from critiquing, and from still believing that this program has grave weaknesses. Ultimately though, staying put is more about trying to take back some of my autonomy. As I try and show my students, in the act of studying and writing you have the readymade tools not only to change your own viewpoint, but also by extension to change your environment.