blog # 10 overview

For the last blog I decided to write an overview/opinion of the multiple topics that we discussed in class. In the 10 short weeks that this class has met, I feel that we have covered a wide variety of issues that affect both the everyday life of an educator, as well as, national education issues. The issues that I found to be most relevant to my daily life as an educator are the impact of out of school factors, standardized testing, and merit based pay/ unions. After teaching in the south side of Chicago for two years, I was aware that ‘OOSF’s’ existed, and that they impacted our kids, but the in-depth discussions helped me to comprehend just how vast and detrimental they really are. For example, I never really stopped to think about the environmental issues that children suffer from; living in lower SES polluted neighborhoods. The standardized testing issue was defiantly a topic that I could relate to in my daily teaching life, working at a charter school that basis staff merit off of test scores. The discussions on this topic that were held in class really opened my eyes to the problems that the ‘standardized testing craze’ has caused. Instead of learning valuable content or exploring elective classes, students in the public school system are being drilled on test taking skills. Lastly, I found our discussions on merit based pay to be interesting and relevant to my current job situation. As I have mentioned before, I work in a charter school that currently uses the merit pay system. This past year, teachers at our school have attempted to unionize, doing away with the whole idea of merit pay. As expected, there has been a lot of controversy surrounding this issue. I found our class discussions concerning merit pay and unions very insightful