The A+ Activist

Picture this if you will: February is the shortest month of the school year. In my district it is also one of the month’s where kids have the most days off due to teacher inservice days, and holidays like President’s Day and MLK Day. If you combine those missed days of learning with the number of days their teacher is missing from the classroom, how much do you think they are actually learning?

Not much and in January, msnbc.com confirmed my thoughts with this article .

Are you mad yet? If not you should be and here’s why:

The article discusses the fact that many of the substitutes employed to cover those teacher abcenses aren’t the most qualified for the job. In fact some states don’t even require a college degree. The more difficult the subject (like Trigonometry), the less likely you are to find someone qualified to teach it.

What’s more is the the schools don’t even expect the substitutes to teach the children, they only expect them to follow the lesson plans. Excuse me if I see something wrong with this, but I thought most lesson plans involved instruction on the subjects covered. If a substitute teacher isn’t qualified to teach a subject, how can they be expected to understand and follow the lesson plans if kids have questions.

I’m not suggesting that our teachers don’t deserve time off during the year but I think the administrators and school districts owe it to our children to at least supply them with qualified instructors. I know… hard to do with such tight budgets. I mean if they can’t meet a budget to keep from laying off teachers, how do they bring in substitutes educated enough to teach the hard stuff? Just a thought.

What we need is more backing from the Federal Government (in my opinion). If the government is going to put such mandates on our public schools like the No Child Left Behind Act (big disappointment btw), then they should at least make sure the schools have the tools they need to make sure that NO CHILD IS LEFT BEHIND.

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