NCLB Watch LOOKING BACK IN SADNESS

Questioning a District's Commitment

By Diane Butler

I read the articles written by former public school Montessori teachers with great interest, since I am one also. My recent three-year stint in a public Montessori program left me nearly brokenhearted. I am now teaching in a private school at a significant pay cut, but I am no longer crying myself to sleep in despair because educating children has become a guerrilla activity. I can once more prepare children for life instead of preparing them to pass tests.

In our district, the Montessori program was being gutted in favor of, among other things, the No Child Left Behind mandates. The profound irony of the No Child Left Behind Act in a Montessori school is that it causes vulnerable children to be left further behind by taking time and resources away from a method that works, and replacing it with something that doesn't.

These are children against whom the deck is already stacked-fathers in jail, mothers working more than one minimum wage job; a series of care-givers bridging the gaps between home and school; breakfasts of soda pop; and bedtime signaled by when the gunfire starts in the streets outside.

The Montessori Program provides a respite and a buffer for these children, as well as a resource for parents.

Creeping Erosion of the Montessori Program

When annual statewide tests first began, Montessori teachers and administrators in our district spent hundreds of hours carefully designing Montessori approaches to prepare our students. In a few short years that test was scrapped in favor of one with quite different ideas about what students should know, and the formats in which they should demonstrate their knowledge. We were back to Square One.

Soon the district decided to prepare children for the Big Test by giving quarterly tests on reading and math. Tight resources were further strained to pay administrators to devise quarterly tests, print, distribute, score, and report the scores.

These tests did not match the Montessori program in content or form. Our daily work periods were thrown up for grabs on whichever days the tests happened to arrive. Since there were different tests for each grade, a class with a three-year-age-span was thrice impacted with children being shuffled throughout the building to create single age classrooms for the duration of the tests.

When quarterly testing didn't produce sufficient results, the School District began handing down mandated homework; poorly written, not aligned with Montessori classrooms, and not as valuable as the homework our students were already doing. As I left, testing and homework for kindergartners were being mandated.

The pressure to produce children who could perform on tests began to extend down to the preschool program as well. One of the preschool teachers was reported for allowing four-year-olds to do sensorial activities in the afternoon instead of making them do academics with the all-day kindergartners.

The day I knew I was through was the day of the grade-level meeting where we were handed 73 pieces of paper, all telling how to prepare our students to pass the tests. We were told that the required evidence of preparation was to be kept in the front of the top drawer of our file cabinet for instant verification by any administrator who wanted to see it. Failure to produce the evidence was grounds for dismissal.

The Effect on Children

Governments and administrators assume that students care about their test scores and will always do their best on tests. In fact, while that is true for most students, there are enough other responses to render the results less than accurate.

In our program, some children gave up before they began. When the tests appeared on their desks, they dutifully filled in bubbles, one in each numbered row. The trouble was, they didn't read the questions.

Some children huddled with their heads down over the test booklets, tears plopping on the paper as they struggled to answer questions that were too difficult for them. The less able students had their worst fears about their abilities confirmed regularly, even though as Montessori students they were working their way through the materials and making progress.

Ironically, a common response of some of the brightest students was indifference or contempt for what they judged to be a senseless, too-frequent interruption of their work. These students, whose scores could have helped to convince the District that the Montessori program was actually producing results, only gave the tests a half-hearted try.

What They Really Want:
To Keep Their Jobs and Stay Out of Trouble

My experience taught me that large public school systems are not interested in children--not in their education, or their physical or mental health. They also are not interested in the physical or mental health of their teachers or their principals. They are not interested in parents, unless the parents are giving them trouble. The school system is interested in preserving the administration, specifically in not being sued and not losing federal money. Once I figured that out, their actions made a kind of warped sense.

Another light went on when I realized that testing and textbooks are industries that only survive by planned obsolescence. If they produced tests and textbooks that educated and measured reliably, there wouldn't be any need for school districts to spend millions and millions of dollars on the next, latest model. About every three years, just as teachers become skilled at implementation, a new series of textbooks or a new test is brought in. There was not enough money to buy toilet paper or soap, fix broken toilets or sinks (my students were washing their hands in the drinking fountain after going to the bathroom), but somehow there was money to change books and tests.

In contrast to the usual momentum of a school year, the mood and energy of our school picked up in May and continued to hum through June. That was when all the tests and interruptions were done, and we could just have a Montessori school. The joy and enthusiasm returned, as projects and children blossomed.

I loved my colleagues, the children, the parents, the principal, and the custodians. But the administration beat me. I'm not proud of that, but it's the truth. I was also tired of hearing myself complain without knowing how to positively influence the situation. So I left.

The public school Montessori movement is enormously important. My hat is off to everyone who has what it takes. I'm sad to say I didn't. I'm happy to say that I am happily teaching again.

Diane Butler lives in Bellevue, WA and is a teacher trainer for the Montessori Education Institute of the Pacific Northwest.