Change is Good?!

Tuesday was my last day at Timber Lane Elementary, a public school in Fairfax County. I am now employed, as of August 14, 2005, with Capital City Public Charter School in Washington, DC. The reason I am changing schools is first and foremost for professional reasons. When I started my master's degree program at UVA and started reading Deborah Meier and Ted Sizer I knew I wanted to work in a Coalition School like the one's they were talking about. I want to provide families a more intimate school to have their children attend, one where the parents and the children new their teachers personnally. Students in Coalitions Schools aren't just numbers, they are children with value.
Of course, I think that Timber Lane offered that, however, they were too absorbed with testing. They were pressured from their administration to raise test scores or they would lose funding and children could choose to go to another school. Timber Lane was the only school of its kind to not have to offer the choice to parents to go somewhere else because we passed NCLB AYP. Yeah!
The teachers that I worked with were great teachers. They really care for the kids. However, their instruction and pedagogy wained as they tried to teach the random Standards of Learning. They constantly worried about whether or not their children were learning the material; some were, some weren't. Those that could learn it could memorize random facts presented in a disconnected way and still do well on a test. You know the one's. The other students had no clue which way was up or down. They had made no connections to the material presented to them because of the disorganized, teach-to-the-test instruction. You might ask, Why didn't you stay around, Jill? You want organized instruction and radical pedagogy, then change the way it is at Timber Lane.
Here's the thing. Timber Lane is not ready for that. The teachers like to have the standards right their at their finger tips so that when they sit down on Friday to write their weekly lesson plans they know which objectives to teach. They also know that if they mess around with any other sort of radical pedagogy, that means that they are wasting time.
What they don't realize, and I did try to explain it to them as best as I could, is that the children will not learn the material presented unless they make a connection to their own lives. (Good luck with Virginia History, and to the rest of the states who require state history to immigrants and transient students). The students must also have ownership of the material rather than feeling like a receptacle for knowledge. They must have power of their own learning for meaning to take root. Now that seems easy enough, but Timber Lane is not ready for that. The teachers and administration do not feel as if they have the time, nor autonomy to provide this sort of instruction. They must teach the rock cycle, Ancient Civilizations, Butterflies, and more, all in one year.
Anyway, I am moving to a school that has the sort of integrated teaching that I think works for kids and provides them with the knowledge to be good citizens and smart critical thinkers. Now I must go and see if it really is all that I expect. My goal is to take what I learn at CapCity and integrate it into public schools who feel out of control with testing. If I can't do it inside existing public schools, than I can help create teams who are willing to change and provide a new school for children to attend if the shoe fits. I am not talking about vouchers for Catholic schools. That is a whole different topic. I am talking about school choice. Matching school philosophies with families.