Every Student Is Educated
Part of what makes teaching a challenging career is the diversity of the students that you teach. Every student is unique, having their own background, needs, and learning styles. Teachers in the United States cannot use a “cookie cutter” approach to teaching. They have to adapt their instruction to every individual student’s strengths and weaknesses. Being adept at making these changes and adjustments is difficult to every teacher. Teaching would be a much simpler task if this were not the case.
Increased Curriculum Responsibility
In the early days of American education, teachers were only responsible for teaching the basics, which includes reading, writing, and arithmetic. Over the last century, those duties have increased significantly. It seems that every year teachers are asked to do more and more. Author Jamie Vollmer highlights this phenomenon calling it the “ever increasing burden on America’s public schools”. Things that were once considered a parent’s responsibility to teach their children at home are now the school’s obligation. All of these increased responsibilities have come without a great increase in the length of the school day or the school year meaning that teachers are expected to do more with less.
Lack of Parental Support
Even the best teachers can’t do it all by themselves because it takes a total team effort from the teachers, parents, and students. Parents are the strongest link because they are there throughout the child’s life while the teachers will change. There are three vital keys to providing effective parental support. Those include ensuring the child is aware that education is important, communicating effectively with the teacher, and making sure that the child is successfully finishing their assignments. If any of these components is lacking, there will be a negative academic impact on the student.
Lack of Proper Funding
School finance has a significant effect on a teacher’s ability to maximize their effectiveness. Factors such as class size, instructional curriculum, supplemental curriculum, technology, and various instructional programs are impacted by funding. Most teachers know that this is completely out of their control, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating.
School finance is driven by each individual state’s budget. In lean times, schools are frequently forced to make cuts that can’t help but have an adverse impact. Most teachers will make maximize the resources they are given, but it doesn’t mean that they couldn’t do a better job with more financial backing.
Over Emphasis on Standardized Testing
Most teachers will tell you that they don’t have an issue with the standardized tests themselves, but how the results are interpreted and utilized. Many teachers will tell you that you can’t get a true indicator of what any particular student is capable of on a single test on any particular day. This becomes especially exasperating when many students have nothing riding on these tests, but every teacher does.
This over-emphasis has led many teachers to shift their overall approach to teaching directly to these tests. This not only takes away from creativity, but it can also quickly create teacher burnout. Standardized testing puts a lot of pressure on a teacher to get their students to perform.
One of the main problems with standardized testing is that many authorities outside of education only look at the bottom line of the results. The truth is that the bottom line hardly ever tells the whole story. There is a lot more that should be looked at than just the overall score. Take the following scenario for example:
There are two high school math teachers. One teaches in an affluent suburban school with lots of resources, and one teaches in an inner city school with minimal resources. The teacher in the suburban school has 95{4af8e172e4aee840aa64fd593c7860d642993d6008ce055710cb1dc52100e83d} of their students score proficient, and the teacher in the inner city school only has 55{4af8e172e4aee840aa64fd593c7860d642993d6008ce055710cb1dc52100e83d} of their students score proficient. It appears that the teacher in the suburban school is the more effective teacher if you are only comparing overall scores. However, a more in-depth look at the data reveals that only 10{4af8e172e4aee840aa64fd593c7860d642993d6008ce055710cb1dc52100e83d} of students in the suburban school had significant growth while 70{4af8e172e4aee840aa64fd593c7860d642993d6008ce055710cb1dc52100e83d} of the students in the inner city school had significant growth.
So who is the better teacher? In fact, you can’t tell simply from standardized test scores, yet many want to utilize standardized test scores alone to judge both student and teacher performances. This simply creates many problems for teachers. They would be better served as a tool to help guide instruction and instructional practices rather than as a tool that is the end all for teacher and student success.
