As a teacher, I already have enough to do just to teach my students history and engage in the day-to-day minutiae of managing a classroom. I don't need to be monitoring these additional factors that the Brits are going to impose upon schools (and ultimately, upon teachers) in the very near future.

Schools will be made to keep records of teenage pregnancy rates, pupils' drug problems, criminal records and obesity levels under government plans to give parents a true picture of children's lives.

The ideas, set out in a discussion document from the Department for Children, Schools and Families, suggest schools would become accountable for 18 new targets, from bullying and neglect, to what happens to pupils after they leave school. Sources said the 10-page document, entitled Indicators of schools' performance in contributing to pupil wellbeing, calls for Ofsted inspectors to judge schools on the wide range of measures in addition to existing criteria such as exam results and exclusion rates. The measures could be implemented by Ofsted from 2009, and suggest that schools would become broadly responsible for children's safety, enjoyment and happiness.

So let's see here -- now teachers are going to be somehow held responsible for student "extra-curricular activities" like their sex lives, drug use, and off-campus diet. Schools will be rated not just upon academic indicators, but also upon these "indicators of pupil well-being" -- in other words, based upon criteria that are realistically beyond the control of school officials.

Take that teen pregnancy one. My experience is that most students do not become pregnant at school. We can teach abstinence (our current method here in texas) or supply socialized birth control on top of extensive sex education (the British method), but we cannot stop teenagers from "putting Tab A into Slot B". We are not in control of the diet of students outside of a school setting, or whether or not they do drugs away from school.

Indeed, many of these indicators are less related to school factors than they are to socio-economic or cultural ones. Why make tracking and remedying them the responsibility of relatively low-paid teachers -- most of whom are not trained to remedy them in the first place?

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Posted by: Greg at 10:30 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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