DoE Mandates Now Prevent Teaching the Curricula for an Average of 35 Minutes of Every Class Period | D. A. Russell

DoE Mandates Now Prevent Teaching the Curricula for an Average of 35 Minutes of Every Class Period | D. A. Russell:

DoE Mandates Now Prevent Teaching the Curricula for an Average of 35 Minutes of Every Class Period

 In 1990, a classroom teacher typically had all but six minutes per class available to teach the lesson plan for the day. We were able to dive into the lesson content, and use best practices reinforcement techniques to engage and challenge students. Children did an hour-plus of homework each night, studied before tests, and enjoyed earning their successes. Children graduated from high school ready for college, and were soon ready for amazing careers. The USA ranked at or near the top of worldwide educational performance.

Just twenty-five years later the picture could not be more different. Nearly 20 nations have passed the USA in educational effectiveness. Both SAT and ACT testing services find only 26% of high school graduates are ready for college. College freshmen are spending their first year repeating high school courses - resulting in more and more downgrades to associate degrees due to lack of college credits. Children average just 1.5 hours of homework per week, and just 14% study the night before a test. Standardized test scores are down and graduation rates continue to decline. 46% of all new teachers quit the profession within the first five years. Charter schools are failing across the nation.

And we have cheated an entire generation of children out of a good education.

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Yet we continue to take the easy way out and falsely place all the blame on the "big four" for these problems - bad funding, bad unions, bad children, and bad teachers. Few people outside the classrooms - certainly not the state and federal unions focusing on being PACs rather than listening to their local union pleas for help with destructive mandates, and certainly not the legislators who gladly take all donations so they can kick the can down the road for real fixes - ever see the real issues that have destroyed effective education in our schools.

One of the most severe factors is the steep reduction in teaching time within a class period because of mandates that prevent teachers from teaching. Today, mandates by career DoE bureaucrats have usurped an average of 35 minutes per class period for non-instruction duties, actually preventing the teacher from teaching the lesson plan - yet the teacher is held accountable for covering the same lesson plan in the reduced time. The least disruption (25 minutes) is found in honors-level courses, because they typically have fewer or no inclusion student mandates. The most (45 minutes) is in a typical standard-level class with 15-plus inclusion students. My classes averaged 18 inclusion students.

A vital caveat: the issue is not whether these additional topics are valuable, important, or necessary. Assume, for the sake of argument, 100% agreement that all are vital. Then we must also accept the painful tradeoff that they replace portions of the traditional curricula. If an assembly for allergies is mandated to be more important than a math class, so be it. But it is then irrational to hold the math teacher responsible for being unable to teach the complete lesson plan because the children were out of the classroom again.

Here is a summary look at some of the major mandates that take a teacher away from DoE Mandates Now Prevent Teaching the Curricula for an Average of 35 Minutes of Every Class Period | D. A. Russell: