E05: What changes is necessary in education (USA)

Transcription by audio.com The speaker discusses the need for changes in education policies and practices, suggesting the removal of administrators to allow teachers and communities to create more meaningful approaches. They describe a successful grading overhaul at their school and express frustration with administrative barriers that hinder communication between teachers, parents, and students. The speaker highlights the importance of trust and collaboration among all stakeholders in the education system. The bigger question is, what changes would you like to see in education policies or in practice? Okay, so it's really simple. No more administrators. I think they get in the way. The school I was at, the educators did a pretty good job of creating new policies, new understandings of what they were going to do. We had a whole grading for equity overhaul thing where we stopped using numbers and started using words. It was interesting. Instead of A, B, C, we had proficient distinguished. There were clear rubrics for everything of what would give you a proficient or whatever. Is that the rubrics for students? That was in the teaching group I was in. The team wanted to try this thing out and got permission to do it from the administration. They followed this book that had mixed thoughts. At the end of the day, the district provides the grades, so they still had to convert it to a number, which was horrible. There were all these things where you treat things as practice or performance instead of a test. I don't know, all these fascinating changes. Regardless, this was a huge overhaul that was done just by the teachers, and I watched it happen. I think people who know their communities and know the kids they're working with, and kids, honestly, who know their situations can work together to create meaning without having some sort of person in between them and politicians. I think there's got to be ways to organize so that we don't have – I just think administrators are what made things hard and made things feel really unjust. It's everything coming from the top like that. It kind of feels like in the school when you know that teachers are the ones doing the job from the grassroots, right? It kind of feels like they're not being heard much. I think it's not that they're not being heard. It's that there's artificial barriers between them and the community. I don't know, there's something that happens where if there's a problem with a kid, the fact that it goes up the ladder to be addressed means that there's this weird barrier between the teachers and the parents. Even though we do communicate, we're not – I don't know. Yeah, it feels like it creates this wall. You don't get to talk with the parents. Parents would not want to talk with the teachers. Rather, they would want to talk with the principals or people in admin. I think for a lot of issues, it's not a choice for the parents. It's who is interacting with them from the school, and it ends up being the administrator. But there is a lot of – they want us to constantly be calling the parents. When you have 100 kids or whatever, it can be really challenging to keep all of those relationships when there's not opportunities, when there's nothing built into the schedule where you're just supposed to call them and say what's up. Maybe if there were more events that we interacted at, it could be better. They would know because you're the one who is working with the students. I just think there's a lot of layers of distrust, too. I don't know. There's a lot of parents that don't trust what the teachers are saying about their kids. There's a lot of teachers that don't trust what the parents are saying about their kids. I don't know. No one trusts what the students are saying about themselves because they're just – they're 12. Why trust a 12-year-old with their own autonomy?