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Home : 2001 : Jan : 2

    do we send mixed messages?
    By kristy
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    I've been a teacher for 15 years and the theme I've heard all through those years is that we need parents to be more involved and take more responsibility for their children and their children's educational progress. Now, I recognize that there are many ways for that to happen (reading to their kid, feeding them breakfast, PTO, etc.), but I do think sometimes parent requests are a valid expression of parent involvement. I'm going to be very frank here --- truthfully, there are teachers in most of our buildings who should not be teaching. Teaching is a profession where mediocre performance (or sometimes even poor performance) is not easily dealt with. I do think that when one teacher is consistently chosen over another, some real evaluation has to be done by the teachers and the administration. And I know, there are many very unfair reasons why that happens and that it is not always an indicator of teacher performance. But, sometimes it is! And, as a parent (and an educator, too) it makes me furious that any child would be stuck in bad environment for a whole year because the teacher has a contract that is automatically renewed based upon seniority. Now, I know this opens a BIG can of worms with complicated issues, and I am not really advocating for huge changes, but I do think there is some accountability for administrators to look at these situations, evaluate and then take appropriate actions. For example, suggest some improvement plans for the teacher who is truly poor. In my building, requests must be in very early in the spring to be considered and are encouraged to have reasoning related to learning style rather than specific teacher preference. Then we work with those to create balanced groups like many of the other posts have mentioned. This has worked very well in every grade level except one, and in that situation there is one very poor teacher, so there are many requests. I think parents need to be given a little more credit for having good judgement sometimes.

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