Saturday, May 10, 2014

Louisiana Educator: Discipline, Cheating, Deteriorating Morale. . . The Real Threats to the EBR School System

Louisiana Educator: Discipline, Cheating, Deteriorating Morale. . . The Real Threats to the EBR School System:



Discipline, Cheating, Deteriorating Morale. . . The Real Threats to the EBR School System


The paper containing the Teacher Bill of Rights is "mostly useful in the bathroom". That's the conclusion of a demoralized teacher in EBR who was questioned by a reporter about enforcement of state discipline laws. My conclusion after reviewing the reports by Crazy Crawfish and the WAFB Channel 9 report called Classrooms of Fear, is that the biggest threat to the future of the EBR school system is an internal one based on incompetent and uncaring management. The Crazy Crawfish blog is titled EBR Teachers are Under Seige and Need our Help!

The EBR school system has been preoccupied with fighting off takeover efforts by the LDOE and by citizens in the Southeast wanting to form their own breakaway school district. But the biggest enemy of the EBR system is its own management.This is new management that was brought in by a new school board with a majority elected with the help of the Baton Rouge Area Chamber of Commerce. The goals of this new management has been to raise school performance scores at all costs, to prevent additional school takeovers, and to get the LDOE off its back for supposedly excessive student suspensions. In my opinion, that new management has ignored some of the most basic principles of school management and is presiding over the deterioration and eventual collapse of the school system.

Crazy Crawfish recently published a post detailing the collapse of discipline in many classrooms and the pressure by administrators to cut down on suspensions, and to graduate as many students as possible with little regard to actual student achievement.

More recently WAFB television aired an investigative series titledClassrooms of Fear, also containing the testimony of several teachers who are being driven to resign from their teaching jobs in EBR because of intolerable student disruptions and even threats of physical harm. Several of the teachers testified in both reports that they had personally suffered physical and verbal abuse by students. These teachers are actually powerless to correct misbehaving students and are expected by the school 
Louisiana Educator: Discipline, Cheating, Deteriorating Morale. . . The Real Threats to the EBR School System: