Insight and Wisdom – CSCOPE Controls Teachers

Many would say that those opposing CSCOPE are anti Public School- That could not be further from the truth. At WomenOnTheWall.org we stand for Public School teachers. Our goal is to give them their classroom back. The two groups that are completely marginalized in the CSCOPE debate are Teachers and Parents which are the two groups that are actually closest to the children. Therefore their voices are the most important.

This was posted on a teacher blog ….teachers.net

What many C-SCOPE crusaders fail to realize is that C-SCOPE has been in schools for 7 years and for many districts C-SCOPE is all they have, there is nothing to fall back on.  
Every district has at least one person in curriculum and instruction. We had one for every subject. Before we adopted cscope they did nothing. They had great salaries and did not work on curriculum.
A new superintendent came in and they were all replaced by new team and coaches. They haven’t done much either. They became the cscope patrols. They never taught any of the lessons. One of our new coaches just left her classroom having 60 percent of her class fail. Wow what a joke.
Cscope came in this last year and we failed royally with it. Reading from scripted text that was suppose to be research based even though it wasn’t.  
Now we talk that we will have lots of school districts without a curriculum. Districts were paying millions for cscope so why not hire a good size group to write, adapt etc. curriculum. Money available for cscope but not for writers?
Come on this cscope stuff just gave these service centers plenty of money and they could have gotten together with these curriculum writers for free and assisted with making sure the treks were covered.
Cscope is a mess. It has way too many paper worksheets, tests galore and we need it dead forever.
We had many, many teachers that quit the district. Now they don’t have enough teachers and they are scrambling after anyone they can hire and mostly with no classroom experience. So defending cscope as being the best out there is not true.

Let’s talk about how Teachers are evaluated.

I asked a Texas Teacher – Does this article give an accurate description of how teachers are evaluated in Texas?

Confusion, fear greet school system

Excerpt from the above article. 

What if half your performance evaluation was based on your co-workers’ output, not your own?

Those co-workers might not even be in your department or field.

The other half of your evaluation would depend on your supervisor’s observations.

That’s what more than 17,000 of Nevada’s 25,000 public school teachers face under the state’s first mandatory teacher evaluation system. The vast majority of teachers soon will be evaluated on the test scores of students they never saw or subject areas they didn’t teach, or both.

Here was the response…….
This is the last year under the old PDAS (Professional Development Appraisal System).
 
Next year they will be bringing in a new system.  These are the component parts of the future:
 
Principals are trained to be enforcement officials who conduct chronic, frequent walkthroughs.  That has already started.  Last year Wichita Falls ISD 1,005 walkthroughs.
 
They are anxious to link teacher evaluation to test scores.  That will be factored in somehow on a point system.
 
Llano ISD CSCOPE Defenders!

Llano ISD CSCOPE Defenders!

Teachers will be dismissed much easier without any right to rebut a poor performance review.  In the past, we were assured of a time period to improve with professional development and mentoring.  That is over.

 
What you have to remember is that teachers will move to grade levels with less testing, they will try to get out of assignments where they have to take students with learning disabilities.  They will opt for positions like gifted-and-talented where the students are all likely to do well on the state test.  This will make certain positions have a very high turnaround rate with young teachers.
 
They are moving into areas this year with the new system, like frequent walk throughs.  It is very demoralizing for a high performing teacher.

It is interesting because after what we witnessed in Llano (photo to the right) last Friday all the dots are connecting. There are reports that the Superintendent gave the district the day off so district employees could come to the hearing. (FYI- On the tax payers dime). They were indeed there in their orange shirts ready to defend CSCOPE. 

It makes you wonder why. Clearly CSCOPE has major flaws. Why would a district be so dependent on an inferior product? Maybe because the system was put in place and the “Control of Teachers” is working quite nice. That is for those who are in CONTROL and making a lot of money off the backs of Texas Teachers!