Policymakers’ effectiveness falls

THE PERCENTAGES of ineffective and minimally effective secretaries of education, governors and APS decision-makers are continuing to rise. (Secretary of Education Hanna) Skandera has given us standardized testing that is of little or no use to our students and educators — with shallow data available to teachers; old, never-updated practice tests for PARCC; and the ridiculous annual carnival of school scores.

The number of ineffective and minimally effective policymakers at APS is also rising. The latest boondoggle, Springboard, is a transparent attempt by the College Board to recapture the market share it has lost to the ACT. Transparent to a lot of us, but not to APS, which is wasting millions of dollars on materials they would like to force teachers to use.

These materials completely disregard the backgrounds and problems that our students face and the different paces at which they must be allowed to work in order to succeed. As foolishly instituted at Rio Rancho, APS would have made teachers into robots controlled by administrators and greedy College Board executives but for the efforts of the teachers’ union to stop them.

The College Board may be nonprofit when it comes to paying their fair share of taxes, but not when you look at their executives’ salaries. The same goes for APS and the unconscionable disparity between the salaries of administrators and teachers.

A fraction of Springboard money could have gone to good old-fashioned books, workbooks and even technology for the alarming amount of kids in our district who simply do not have access to minimal technology and training. Something should also have gone to teachers who have seen their effective salaries drop so precipitously in the last decade that only the likes of our current politicians and their ilk could be as hard-hearted as to let it go on.

The problem is not teachers — never has been teachers — and has always been the top-heavy, salary-heavy, politics-heavy nonsense from those who think they know better than the people who spend hour after hour and day after day in the classroom. The secretary, the governor and a good many at APS need to be on an improvement plan; the best start would be jobs in other states so we teachers can be left alone to do our jobs as they should be done — with attention to the backgrounds, ethnicity, humanity and challenges of our students. IRA COOPER Albuquerque