That’s the undercurrent of Tara Servatius’ latest dispatch from deep within CMS. Teachers absolutely will not go for Peter Gorman’s plan to lure the best teachers intot he worst schools, she reports.
High school teachers know that far, far too many kids are lost causes by the time they reach the 9th grade. As they told Tara:
“If you don’t put gates on the gateway,” said Judy Kidd, “how do you expect to blame the (high school) teachers when (middle school) principals promote functional illiterates?”
Kidd, head of the Classroom Teachers Association, says the plan won’t work unless the school system ends the social promotion of eighth graders who fail their end-of-course tests and are promoted to high school anyway. …
“We have 14 sections of kids who have not passed the eighth grade test, but they came to high school,” said Joanne Whitley, chair of the math department at Garinger. “The other high schools can hide these kids under good scores. We can’t.”
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the absolute crux of the problem facing CMS. The end of cross-county busing made “hiding” poor-scoring clusters difficult to impossible — although the planned move to “schools within schools” creates new shell game opportunities on this front. Still, learning essentially stops in middle school for large chunks of CMS students. Their high school years are just an elaborate ruse.
Students, if they stay out of serious, embarassing trouble, get a diploma while CMS gets money for each and every warm body. It is a dysfunctional win-win. And it will not stop until someone makes it stop.
