As I reflect on my past years at N.C. State, I always go back to the beginning: How did I come to get here? Each time I think back to my high school chemistry teacher and guidance counselor pushing me to accomplish my goal of becoming a teacher. No matter how you’ve come to be here, in some way or another you’ve had a teacher impact you along the way, positive or negative.
My goal-and hopefully the goal of many others in the College of Education-is to make a positive impact on the lives of future students. Believe it or not, teaching in today’s society is different from the few years ago when we were in school. With the increasing criteria and standards of curricula, the growing negativity surrounding education, and a shrinking budget, the task of teaching is not as simple as it appeared to be.
Teachers are required to not only meet standards from their superiors, but the community around them. If teachers are doing a poor job educating their students, it reflects poorly on the school. However, how are these teachers measured? Or better yet, how should they be measured?
So, what does any of this has to do with you? Eventually, when we are all grown up, you will either have kids who go to public school, pay taxes for public school, or worry about the quality of your local school to increase your property values. Regardless of how public education will affect you, the quality of education has everything to do with you.
My goal is to provide your future children, schools and community with the best possible education I can provide. To do this, you would agree I must be knowledgeable about my job. Not merely the mastery of my courses’ content, but also how my students and myself are assessed, how my school gets funding, what determines this funding and all the other nitty-gritty details one should know about their job.
In order to get a better idea of these details, I will be taking a trip with the N.C. State Teaching Fellows program to Washington, D.C. to meet with officials from the Department of Education and discuss future educational policies that I will be held accountable for.
These topics range from federal funding for schools, standardized testing, teacher pay and professional developments, among other things. The point is, we will have a brief moment to have voice our opinions about the future of education. Some might say this brief meeting will have little to no impact on education’s future, so why bother?
Because we are always being told to voice our opinions and make our thoughts known in attempts to make a difference. I ask these people, what better way to improve education than ask the people who will be starting out in it? This only makes sense.
In our attempt to push every child forward, we’re all being left behind, teachers included. We need to come up with a solution for assessing students and teachers, and we need a way to reach out to low-performing schools and help them improve. We need to be able to locate the fat of education and eliminate it.
As broad as these solutions may be, the specifics exceed the word limit for this column. However, my peers and I will pose these solutions to the Department of Education in our brief visit and hope our pleas do not fall on deaf ears. Next week I will publish the results of this experience, and I look forward to hearing what you have to say about them.