5th Grade Teacher... what the hell is going on with education?
I am a fifth grade teacher just finishing my 25th year of teaching. I teach at a kindergarten through eighth grade school with just about a thousand students. About 5% of our students are the real troublemakers, and they take a toll on their teachers, the students around them, and the administration. They do absolutely no work, wreak havoc throughout the day, and are basically babysat, or there are interventions being used to change their behavior. The kicker is that these students have been at our school for years, and there has been no improvement in behavior or academics, for that matter.
After talking to my vice principal today, she admitted that there really is nothing else we can do for these students because there's nowhere the district will send them, no matter what interventions, no matter how many suspensions, no matter what. We have to follow a behavior matrix that essentially places the responsibility solely on the school, not the district level, not the parents, and not the students. Since there is nowhere else for these students to go, am I to believe and work as if education is stuck and only going to get worse?
I'm usually very much a glass is half full kind of person, but I'm trying to look at the bigger picture of the connection between society as a whole and education. It seems that the denigration of society is very much affecting the denigration of our school system. Being so close to retirement, I'm really beginning to question how much longer I should stay in it.
My questions for this group are:
-What is the consensus for the future of education?
-Is my perception based on reality?
-What are your personal thoughts on all of this?