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Teachers, administrators, board members, state education agencies, legislators, and taxpayers: which is the most important group? Identifying the influence of the many groups of professionals and individuals in an education system that shape the curricula that teachers deliver to students is no easy feat. Effectively coordinating the contributions and the suggestions of people connected to education is difficult, yet that is exactly the nature of the challenge today. If we are to provide a quality education to every student, we need to recognize that how people feel about the schools largely depends on the nature of the interactions that they have had with members of a school system. Indeed, whether recognized or not, most us see through the lenses of the experiences that we often bring to the opportunities that we may have to “reform” or to restructure education. That is why constructing a teaching environment that allows students to learn better too often proves a nearly unattainable goal. This second section of our book is structured around the assertion that events that occur both inside and outside of the classroom directly and indirectly impact the climate and the nature of the relationships that classroom teachers establish with their students. Although many educators claim to understand that learning is the result of how teachers interface with students, few schools operate according to that principle in their day-to-day activities. If teachers instructing students within the classrooms is widely regarded as the ideal center of the educational enterprise, then everyone else associated with education consciously ought to work to support and to advance this most important of pedagogical relationships. We want to make an issue of this fundamental , anchoring relationship because too many people connected to education today—particularly central office administrative staff members —do not fully appear to understand, or they have forgotten, the nature of their roles in relation to the main obligation and the goal of the schools. The goal of everyone who is not a classroom teacher ought to be to help the hired instructors teach the students. If education stakeChapter 8 104 how to repair an education system holders who are not classroom instructors do not completely understand this basic fact, no amount of excellent work anywhere else in a school district is going to matter much. To achieve the central mission of the schools, then, the actual learning of the students has to be directly affected by the teaching that teachers impart to the students. Many people with specific assigned responsibilities within other parts of an education system pay lip service to the relationship between teachers and students, or they carry out their roles in ways that continually demonstrate that they do not care much for this central relationship. Instead of promoting and facilitating work for the teachers and the students , too many people who are not in the classrooms teaching students, though often well-meaning, unfortunately end up obstructing and making the teaching of youngsters more difficult than the task naturally already is. Currently, for example, the amount of paperwork required of our teachers during their teaching hours is likely the single most stressful requirement. The amount of after-school paperwork and meetings is so dangerously close to overwhelming that many good teachers continually consider and talk about leaving the profession. Take note, for instance, of any school parking lot after 5 p.m. on any given day, including weekends in some schools. Those parked cars do not belong to the students. They belong to teachers trying to meet state and school district paperwork requirements. They are also not earning overtime pay, as many other people do when they have to work past their regular forty-hour weeks. Some people, to be sure, will respond that teachers have their summers off, but few citizens know that teachers are not paid for the months that they are off during the summer. This means that their nine- or ten-month salaries have to stretch to cover the summer months when they are off, or they have to work elsewhere during summers to support their families. Even then, our point was to say that teachers’ cars parked at the schools after hours means that such teachers are usually working to complete the day’s paperwork, not preparing for tomorrow’s classes. Tomorrow’s classes will probably be left for the next morning, for the occupants of those same cars will likely drive in two and sometimes even three hours before classes...

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