An Ariz. teacher makes plea: ‘Give me my classroom’

He’s a teacher, calling to tell me what’s wrong with Arizona’s public schools. How, he wonders, can you set the bar so low and expect to see great results? Low pay, I ask? No, he replies. Low expectations. “We can’t set high expectations, because the districts don’t have high expectations,” he told me. “Districts are afraid of not having the graduation rate.”

Tim Kane teaches at a public high school in the northwest Valley. When teachers sit around and talk about what ails public schools, he says, rarely is low pay brought up. (That’s just a given, this being Arizona.)

Instead, teachers lament that they are unable to prepare students for what lies on the other end of pomp and circumstance. The real world, that is.

“We talk about the constant barrage of policies that are being set to make sure our graduation rates are up,” he said. “We are cheating our kids. (Parents are) being told that we’re trying to get kids college- and career-ready, but we’re not.”

He points to policies in many districts that are designed more to ensure that students pass than to ensure that they are prepared for life after high school. (And you wonder why so many college freshmen have to take remedial classes?)

Policies that allow students to retake tests over and over until they get a grade they like. That allow them to turn in work weeks late and get full credit.

And homework? That, Kane says, is frowned upon.

Lest you lay the total blame on bureaucrats, Kane would tell you that parents are part of the problem.

“There are a lot of parents who aren’t engaged,” he said. “If anything, if I were a legislator, I’d be trying to find a way to force a parent to be engaged in their student’s schoolwork. When we call them to tell them about their kids’ grades, more often than not, we’ll get a call from the principal about why we’re failing X student.”

Kane, who is in his eighth year of teaching, says he’d like a pay raise. But more than that, he says he’d like to be freed from policies that have nothing to do with educating kids and everything to do with looking good on paper in order to score a pay raise or that all-important letter grade given to schools by the state Department of Education.

Something to think about as we ponder what, beyond a lack of adequate funding, ails the public schools.

In a Kane-run classroom, he says, a student could retake a test, but the best they could score would be 75 percent. A late paper would result in a lower grade, and yes, there would be homework. And an end-of-semester grade under 70 percent? That would buy you another year in the class.

“Give me my classroom,” Kane said. “Let me set the bar for my students. … We’re taking the element of failure out, and that’s not getting kids college- and career-ready. It’s a fantasy land.

“What we are being told to teach and how we are being told to teach it, I just know we are producing students who are not ready to walk off that stage and go off into real life.”