I teach at a middle to high upper class public magnet school. No millionaires, but 70% of my student population doesn’t have issues paying for basic needs and many wants and can take a vacation yearly. The other 30% qualify for free and reduced lunches. Even for a majority of our parents in poverty they are highly engaged in their child’s life and that makes up a ton of the difference in wealth. Our students are academically and socially advanced in general. We have fewer behavior issues on the whole. Our parents generally want to work with us.
I say all of that to check my privilege. I fully understand this is not true of a majority of our district. We are excelling as a school because of all that privilege.
That said, I need to underline the part where generally our kids are above the medium for our district scores. Last year no one on our staff used any curriculum to fidelity. We picked the best and left the rest. My same level teacher and I abandoned our Math curriculum mid year and our okay data became exceptionally good. We both had non-readers break the literacy barrier. Kids who were always at the bottom in math either grew more than a year or finally met benchmark at the end of the year for the first time.
So tell me why we were handed a SCRIPTED (Literally, it says “say this”) curriculum and told we would be audited on our fidelity.
Our upper literacy teacher almost lost her mind. She read Romeo and Juliet last year with her kids. This year they recommend “The Brave Little Toaster” as required and “longer reads” as “suggestions for kids outside of class.”
I am offended for myself, and my students. They can achieve a shit ton more if I can keep delivering higher tier instruction that I know all meet my kids needs because *they are different. *
I hoped we had one more year.