Baltimore County teachers' union "call to action"
Baltimore County's new progress-reporting system, still in its pilot phase, continues to come under attack from the district's teachers union.
The system, the Articulated Instruction Module --- or AIM for short --- is a computerized checklist that charts detailed objectives and skills that children are expected to be taught. Tested last spring in a few county schools, the system is being made available on a voluntary basis to all of the county's teachers. With AIM, participating teachers will provide parents progress reports that will tell them whether their children are learning what is expected.
Leaders with the Teachers Association of Baltimore County (TABCO) are calling on the group's 6,000 members to take a stand against AIM. The two-page letter to members includes home addresses and phone numbers for all board members and encourages teachers to write them to express their opposition to AIM. Union leaders also are encouraging teachers to attend tomorrow's school board meeting (7:30 p.m., 6901 Charles St., Towson).
The call to action reads, in part:
Are you are willing to stand by while BCPS puts another data collection requirement on your already full plate? ... We can’t afford to sit by and allow individuals who are not doing the daily work in our classrooms to create yet another data collection piece that takes time away from teaching. Enough is enough! ... We don’t need another form to complete to indicate whether or not a student is making progress. There is
already a myriad of tools in place to track student progress and share that progress more objectively, rather than subjectively, with parents. ... BCPS leaders need to decide: Do they want teachers to teach --- or do they want teachers to spend hours completing reports, checklists, data sheets, tabulating scan sheets, and so on?
If you're a Baltimore County teacher, what are your thoughts about AIM? Will you join the union's call to oppose it ... if so, how ... will you write or call board members, or attend tomorrow's meeting ... or all of the above? Have you used the system in your classroom yet? If you have, please share your experience with us here on the blog.
Click below for my earlier story about AIM.
System charts pupil progress
Baltimore County tests computerized checklist for parents
Gina Davis
Sun Reporter
For years, parents have complained that report cards skimp on the details and don't go far enough in helping them understand what their children have - or haven't - learned in school.
But a new progress-reporting system developed by a longtime Baltimore County educator aims to fill that gap with a computerized checklist that charts detailed objectives and skills.Tested this spring in a few county schools, the system is being made available on a voluntary basis to all of the county's teachers this coming school year, and the superintendent hopes it will be widely used.
In addition to the traditional reports with letter grades that measure students' mastery of a given subject, participating teachers will give parents progress reports that will tell them whether their children can, for instance, convert fractions to decimals or determine percent of a number. Until it is mastered, a skill or objective follows a student from grade to grade.
School officials and community leaders see the reporting system, called the Articulated Instruction Module, as a tool for parents who want guidance on how to help their children.
"As test scores show, too often children are failing, and no one responsible for their education seems to know why, and there is no other evidence in the student's folder other than a bunch of papers with letter grades," said Barbara Dezmon, assistant to the county school superintendent for equity and assurance, who created the program. "At the end of an education, we just know that the student is not adequately prepared."
Some educators and civic leaders applaud the new reports, especially their plain language. Others, including the county's teachers union, worry that the checklists will be one more task on teachers' already full plates and leave them open to undue scrutiny.
It's hard to peg how many school systems nationally are using similar progress reports, but Baltimore County's effort appears to be a rare step toward providing a comprehensive skills inventory that should systematically track a student's progress. Education advocates point to it as an example of what more school systems ought to be doing to ensure that students aren't falling behind.
"These type of growth models go beyond the one-time snapshot and tell us how much does Johnny know now and how much did he progress," said Reginald M. Felton, director of federal relations for the National School Boards Association. "This comprehensive measuring of progress is a step in the right direction so that parents understand, `What is it my child should know?'"
Pleased parent
James West, a 42-year-old logistics manager, said he was pleasantly surprised this spring when his stepson's math teacher gave him a three-page report during a parent-teacher conference.
His stepson, 12-year-old Tyre Bethea, is a rising seventh-grader who was among the students whose teacher at Woodlawn Middle School participated in a small-scale pilot of the program in the system's northwest-area schools, including Powhatan, Hebbville, Woodmoor and Featherbed Lane elementaries.
"It helped us out a great deal," said West, who added that Tyre has struggled with math. "I know what I need to do to help him out. I know what he can do and can't do, and what he's working on."
West said the report helped him determine where Tyre might need tutoring and gives him, as a parent, the confidence that his stepson is on the right track.
"I'd hate for him to go along through each grade and get to the end, get a diploma and still not know what he needs to know to be successful," West said. "This little piece of paper could make a big change for a lot of people."
Other districts, including Prince George's County and Baltimore City, are interested in using the system, according to Baltimore County school officials, who added that all of Maryland's systems can use the copyrighted program for free beginning this year.
Dezmon, a former English teacher, said she began developing the program nearly 20 years ago when she was looking for ways to better communicate with parents, especially those of minority children, and homeless and otherwise transient students.
"This makes it easier to do individualized instruction because the teacher knows exactly what a student has or hasn't learned," Dezmon said. "With this, there are no good kids and no bad kids, just children and the skills they should know."
But the president of the county's teachers union said preparing the progress reports - which would be done quarterly in addition to report cards - will burden overworked teachers. She also worries that instructors will be blamed when a child fails to master a skill.
Doing such reports, in addition to regular report cards, "would create an enormous amount of work for teachers," Cheryl Bost, president of the Teachers Association of Baltimore County, wrote in a July 10 letter to school board members and schools Superintendent Joe A. Hairston.
In a recent interview, Bost said she has several questions, including: What happens when a child continually fails to master a skill - mandatory summer school or repeating a grade? What are school officials doing to ensure that the progress-report objectives are built into teachers' lessons? And, when will teachers find time to do everything that is asked of them?
"This is going to tell parents where the deficit is, but is there a plan in place for when, during the school year, teachers are supposed to find the time to meet the student's needs?" she asked.
School officials said they are still working out details such as when to retain a child in grade.
Bost said she hasn't seen a presentation of how the progress reporting system works, but she has spoken with teachers who participated in the small-scale pilot this spring.
"It's an add-on, from what teachers tell me," she said.
Bost added that she doubts that the system will remain voluntary because it's likely teachers will feel pressured to create the reports by principals who want to impress administrators.
Hairston said he hopes many teachers will choose to create the reports, adding that the school system has "a moral obligation" to provide them because it can.
"What responsible parent would not want this information on their child?" Hairston said. "My responsibility is to at least bring it before the public and let them know it's there."
By the first day of school, school officials say, Baltimore County parents will be able to log onto the system's Web site to access lists of objectives and skills for every class. That way, parents can chart for themselves what their children should be taught during the year.
The computerization of the reports also should make it easier for teachers and administrators to track and analyze student progress, from individuals to the entire district.
Because the reports will show how well students are progressing, officials say, teachers can use them to focus their classroom time.
Under the system, a teacher would give each student letter-grade type ratings every nine weeks on a series of knowledge and skill indicators for each course. Unlike the traditional report card grade, an "A" on this evaluation would mean the child needs "acceleration," or remedial help. An "I" would indicate the need for further "instruction." And an "M" would signal the student is at or approaching "mastery."
Dezmon said she hopes teachers welcome the evaluations as a way to provide more information about their students than they can with the current system of test scores and report cards.
"In this era of testing - state testing and national testing - they have removed the teacher, period," she said. "Teachers are represented in modern education by the letter grades they put on report cards. Everything else fades out. But these [progress reports] are based on teachers' observations of their students."
Teacher in favor
One teacher who tested the new system this spring said he liked it.
Robert King, a math teacher at Woodlawn Middle School, said he found the reports "no more time-consuming" than regular report cards. He said he finished an entire year's worth of reports in about an hour and a half for each of the 25 students in his sixth-grade math class.
King said the list of objectives and skills closely matched what he had taught, and knowing his students' strengths and weaknesses enabled him to quickly complete the checklists.
"As a teacher, whenever they tell you there's something new you're going to have to do, you have reservations," he said. "But with what this allowed me to do, I was impressed."
Besides making his parent-teacher conferences go more smoothly, King said, he can target his instruction for a student who transfers to his class late in the year. He foresees that it could save teachers time, especially at the beginning of the school year, because they won't have to do diagnostic testing for children who are in the database.
"To me, it's a no-brainer," King said. "This is one of the simplest things we've done to get solid tracking of student data. We track grades, but let's be honest, what does a grade tell you? ... This is better than a standard report card because it's a justified grade. It allows parents to have a solid footing of where a student stands."
Baltimoresun.com's 
Comments
I didn't see this covered in the article, but how does the teacher decide if a particular child gets an A, I, or M in a particular area? I guess what I am asking is whether this is linked to a particular assessment or means of assessment, or is it just up to the teacher to think back and say, "Suzy Q did alright at converting fractions to decimals, I guess I'll give her an I."
Posted by: Eric | October 22, 2007 9:10 AM
Hi Eric,
The AIM report is based on a checklist of objectives and skills that the teachers use to gauge a student's progress.
Here's the paragraph from the story that explains how teachers decide which rating applies ---
Unlike the traditional report card grade, an "A" on this evaluation would mean the child needs "acceleration," or remedial help. An "I" would indicate the need for further "instruction." And an "M" would signal the student is at or approaching "mastery."
If you go to the Baltimore County public schools website, you can see more of these checklists. Here's the link to the AIM page ---
http://www.bcps.org/apps/AIMpublic/
Gina
Posted by: Gina Davis | October 22, 2007 11:57 AM
AIM is a good idea in theory, a way to communicate what skills students have mastered and which need to be addressed. Unfortunately, not all theories translate well to sound practices. This reporting system is flawed in many ways. It does not align with the state curriculum, uses a grading system opposite the traditional report cards, and will add undue costs in time and materials to teachers.
Posted by: Cathy | October 23, 2007 2:27 PM
I must say that the sentence that struck me was this:
"He said he finished an entire year's worth of reports in about an hour and a half for each of the 25 students in his sixth-grade math class."
Does that mean he spent 37 hours doing this? That's way more time than a teacher has to spend. Consider that most of us have five classes of 25 or more, which meas we'd then be spending 185 hours total per year on this activity, which equates to more than a month's work.
Now, if this is saying it's only an hour and a half for the entire class, that's much better, but we're still coming in at an extra day of work for teachers every year with no increase to compensation or removal of other requirements.
Baltimore County requires that we adminster Benchmarks and Short Cycle Assessments in addition to MSA/HSA testing. We have data up to our eyeballs. Can't we just give the parents some of what we already have?
Posted by: Andrew | October 23, 2007 3:08 PM
In looking at the checklist of AIM, I believe this checklist is a repeat of what I already do in my classroom. As a middle school math and special education teacher, I have to track MSA scores and how I help my students improve on MSA. I send home frequent progress reports and communicate well with my parents. If parents complain they do not know what skills their child has,they are free to talk with teachers about thier child's specific skills. This checklist will be extra work on my already full full plate of responsibilities. This is going to be a very uneeded piece of paperwork. If the purpose of this checklist is to improve communication with parents about specific skills a student is working on, I already do that! We as teachers stay in contact with the parents and offer support therefore, we do not need this confusing checklist!
Posted by: christina Watts | October 23, 2007 3:12 PM
Hi Andrew,
Robert King said he wrote reports for the 25 students in his sixth-grade math class, and it took him about an hour and a half to complete an entire year's worth of reports. That is a total of the time he spent, an hour and a half.
Posted by: Gina | October 23, 2007 3:13 PM
The comment "He said he finished an entire year's worth of reports in about an hour and a half for each of the 25 students in his sixth-grade math class." also struck me. I think it means that it took him a total of an hour and a half for the entire class.
The problem, teachers teach an average of 4-6 classes a day, some classes have 35 students. So, let's do the math
...it took 75 to complete the aim checklist for 25 students
...but I have 120 students total
... then it would take 360 minutes (or 6 hours) to complete the aim checklist for all of my students. Hmm, when would you like me to do this? I have 50 minutes during the school day when I should be calling parents, grading papers (and oh yeah...planning lessons). We are not paid during our 30 minute "chow-down" of a lunch, and we are paid for the time 15 minutes before and after school. So that's a total of 80 minutes a day I would "technically" have to do these checklists. So it would then take 4.5 days for me to complete all of the checklists during the given time I have to do them. And these reports are coming out every 2-3 weeks (between report card and interim time) so teachers would be doing these checklists nearly all the time.
My question is: When are we going to have time to grade the assignments we need in order to get the data in order to fill out these checklists?
If the checklists are going to get done, they will be done in the wee hours of the night/morning when teachers are supposed to be taking care of their own children/husbands/wives/themselves. Teachers are only paid for the time they are in school (15 minutes before school, 15 minutes after school, and all the time between, except for lunch). If these checklists are going to get done, then teachers need to be paid for their time.
Posted by: Erin Laughter | October 23, 2007 3:24 PM
As a teacher, I'd like to see more parents involved in their students' progress. We send home ample feedback to them re: the progress of their child between interims, progress reports, parent / teacher conferences, and report cards. If the parents don't take the time to come to school and meet with the teacher, why should we have to spoon feed them with yet another "progress report" when it infringes on the time I spend at school planning and executing lessons? The students who need the extra help or who are not experiencing success are generally the ones whose parents never show up to P/T conference night.Can't we put some responsibility for once on the parents to take an active role in their child's education? I'm tired of having it come down to the teacher. What we have in place is fine. LET US TEACH!
Posted by: Suzanne E. | October 23, 2007 3:25 PM
In the four core areas there is alrady more data than is needed. I would agree with one of the previous responders who said we should just give parents the data we already have.
I teach outside of the cored areas, in computer science. The problem in technology areas is that what students need to learn changes faster than our ability to set criteria and create data. I would much prefer learning new skills and teaching them to my students rather than spending my time recording data on skills they did not really need to learn, or have already learned before they got to my class.
Posted by: Ron Peterman | October 23, 2007 3:30 PM
Thank you for the clarification, Gina. There is a large difference between those two time amounts.
Still, I believe that the best way for parents to find out this information about their children is to work with teachers and (most importantly) involve themselves in the lives of their children. A parent who occasionally assists with their child's work can tell if the child has trouble with decimals or is a poor speller. When parents communicate with me via email/telephone/conference, we discuss the child's progress in detail. That dialogue between the three interested parties--parent, teacher, and child--is far more useful than the arbitrary assignment of a letter grade to a variety of objectives.
The AIM system is superfluous. I know it's hard to foster an intangible idea like school-community interaction, but replacing a vital abstraction with an unnecessary data point is the wrong way to fix the problem.
Posted by: Andrew | October 23, 2007 3:33 PM
Let's think past the time it takes to complete AIM, because it will take time for teachers to complete. (I don't think parents will be happy to know that Mr. King spends less than 2 minutes assessing their child's progress for the year!)
If a checklist comes home and tells a parent that a child cannot change a fraction into a decimal, then what. The current math curriculum that tries to prepare students to pass the high stakes MSA or HSA does not allow teachers time to go back and remediate that deficit skill. Teachers have to squeeze hundreds of skills in between August and March each year and move on. In addition, there aren't too many parents I know that will have a math text just sitting around to remediate their child on the skill. So when, how, and by whom will that child become accelerated on deficit skills? Before BCPS implements a reporting program such as AIM, they must have in place a plan to address the needs of the students. If they don't this is just a useless piece of data aimed at pointing fingers. They need to first concentrate on addressing the needs identified in the curriculum audit then go from there.
In addition, BCPS must address the time needed to teach, plan, and complete the multitude of reports. We are turning over 800-1,000 teachers a year and that is costing this system and detrimental to the success of our students. Bottomline- Do you want teachers to teach students and plan great lessons and meet with parents or do you want them to mass produce data items and complete paperwork?
Posted by: Cheryl Bost | October 23, 2007 3:41 PM
Hi everyone,
First, thanks for all your comments. Keep 'em coming!
Second, as I've mentioned to a few of you in direct emails, I'm hearing (not officially, just through the grapevine) that tonight's school board meeting could get interesting on the topic of AIM. Are you guys planning to be there??
Now, I have another question. I have heard, just in conversations, that there has been a long-running complaint about the state of Baltimore County's report cards. Specifically, I've heard they are regarded as badly outdated.You guys have any thoughts on that? It's not directly related to AIM, but I've heard that come up in conversations about AIM, so I just wondered what you guys think of the current report cards.
Also ... a consistent theme I hear coming across in your comments is the idea of parent involvement. That line of discussion dovetails, interestingly, with my story in yesterday's paper on a Woodlawn parent who essentially is arguing the same thing. From her perspective, the parent involvement component ties together everything about schools --- from the physical condition of the building to the academic success of students.
Posted by: Gina | October 23, 2007 3:45 PM
I already spend time planning, grading, communicating with parents, meeting with students, recording other data that we are already required to keep and doing everything else that is included on my job description. AIM is simply asking too much of teachers. Parents already receive report cards, interims, progress reports (often), phone calls, and conferences as ways to communicate. If any of these are deemed insufficient, perhaps they could be replaced by a form of AIM, but teachers simply do not have time to have an additional reporting method added to our plates.
Posted by: Christa Zimmerman | October 23, 2007 3:49 PM
I did something very similar to this when I taught government at New Town High School, except it was called RIM for Remediation, Instruction, and Mastery. It seemed to make a little more sense in addressing the debate over the A. Still, it was very time consuming and I did not send home the data to parents, as it was very difficult to understand unless you were familiar with the ins and outs of the government curriculum. I did send home letters that stated how their students did on benchmark tests that were modelled after the HSA. The benchmark tests were where I got the data for RIM anyway. I kept the data on hand to compare to the data of who passed HSA and who failed HSA for government. I had very good correlation with my data, so I know that this kind of data can help, but it can not be in addition to the data we already have to assemble. There is no time. I had a resource teacher and even some trustworthy students hel me put together all of the data. I took hours and hours to process the data from each of the 9 Unit Test/Benchmarks that I gave to the RIM sheets. Again, I have done it before so I get it, but would I say that it's necessary to explain student achievement, no. The truth is that if you are an effective teacher then you sit down and plan out what the indicators are, how they go back to the VSC, what your daily objectives are and how you are going to teach kids these. When you assess kids on a daily basis and you see they don't get it, what do you do? If you don't plan like that, then you can't explain it, not because it's unexplainable, but because you aren't doing your job. Another thing that really needs to be addressed is the fact that we are expecting all kids to master every objective, indicator, etc. in the first place. Who are we kidding? Ourselves, because the bottom line is that every kid is not going to learn the same things at the same levels, period. Not every kid is being served well by a one-size-fits-all college prep education. The sooner that we can admit this, the sooner we will better be able to serve our kids.
Posted by: Hayward Johnson | October 23, 2007 5:47 PM
As we sit at school planning lessons at 5:40PM, we ask ourselves, what happened to caring about the children and what we know is best for them? At this point, we feel as though we are being forced to look at children as numbers on a continuum. With the addition of more and more benchmarks and short cycle assessments through Assesstrax, as well as the rigor involved in planning every day instruction, we cannot conceive of the idea of placing one more method of reporting data upon teachers' shoulders.
We communicate to parents in so many ways. An interested parent will already know their child's strengths and weaknesses from working with the child and communicating with the teacher.
AIM is REDUNDANT!
We agree with prior bloggers - Let Us Teach!
Posted by: Dianna M. and Kim R. | October 23, 2007 5:52 PM
I am going to the board meeting tonight and have letters to board members against AIM. The cost in time and trees for these additional reports is enormous. By the time I complete all of the testing mandated by the county in all subject areas now, I barely have time to plan engaging lessons and teach them to my students. Not to mention the need for sleep and a bit of a personal life. I am not against keeping parents informed about their children's progress. Improving the report card could help with that. And, if the county would like to make the checklist available on line for parents to see and use in conferences, that is a worthwhile use of it. But my plate is overflowing now, and I physically and mentally can't take much more.
Posted by: Donna McDonough | October 23, 2007 6:02 PM
I love the comment from other bloggers who say that it is now time to put some responsibility on parents for their child's learning. When we have kids come to school who don't take it serious, who don't care if they disrupt the class, who don't care if they get sent to the office (because mom will get them out of trouble), and who don't want to read because it's "boring" (and they probably have never seen it modeled at home because there are no books other than TV guides), and who don't want to write and moan and groan, it is a never ending struggle to motivate these students. I communicate with parents as much as I can, and most parents are very receptive and work with me to help their child be successful. However, there are always parents who don't believe the teacher, who never return your phone calls, who never come to parent conferences, and who never bother to even meet their child's teachers. Is AIM going to be of use for these parents? I think not. I believe that the parents who are involved in their child's education are already communicating with their child's teachers and working with them to help their child be successful. Who are we kidding? All AIM pretends to be is another form of data collection to blame the teacher when the student can't (or many times won't) learn. Enough is enough! It's no wonder teachers are not staying in this profession. There are not enough hours in the day. Now, if you want to pay me the overtime that any other business executive gets when meeting a data crunch? Then, that's another matter.
Posted by: Lorie C. | October 23, 2007 6:29 PM
I am a teacher in a Central Area Baltimore County School and I feel that the county school system is continuously adding more and more ridiculous amounts of assessments that require extra time away from the teacher's school responsibilities and regular at-home responsiblities. When I already have to spend up to 2 hours a week recording data that is collected into a shared drive server file, spend time copying weekly assessments, contacting parents, setting up conferences, dealing w/my principals demands and, on top of all that, trying to be a mom and wife and a master's degree students, this is where I say IT HAS TO STOP!! What is the point of AIMs when we have report cards!?!?!? It's bad enough that our county report card does not even match our newly revamped curriculum, but now we may be expected to duplicate the assessments monthly, add more data to another server, and repeatedly type progress report after progress report. The job of teacher's today is so overwhelming that many of us want to quit. If you want quality teachers, than you need quality assessments, NOT time-cosuming "reports" that make no sense and take more time away that could be spent planning valuable lessons!
Posted by: D.P. | October 23, 2007 7:47 PM
Are many of the southeast parents going to look at this report or will they discard it with the many absetee letters we send home informing them of the importance of even sending their child to school? I am so gald the central area parents and some of the Southwest parents are involved...maybe they need to come speak to our southeast parents about involvement. I wouldn't have so much reservation about the extra work wtih AIM if I could name more than about 7 parents of the 50 or so 4th/5th graders I teach that would actaully regard, understand, and help the child with the information that AIM presented.
Posted by: Jesse | October 23, 2007 8:03 PM
Enough is enough!
The best way to discuss student progress with parents is to work on ways to get more parents to attend parent/teacher conferences and have a discussion about student work and expectations.
Elementary Conference Day is scheduled for November 19, 2007. The elementary schools will be closed for students so that parents can meet with teachers throughout the day. I'll be there to share the progress of each of my 27 first graders with those parents who decide to make it a priority to attend these conferences. I am also in continuous communication with parents via email, notes, phone calls, weekly checklists, monthly newsletters, volunteer calendars,test reports,surveys, and report cards with detailed comments. AIM is missing the mark with teachers, parents and students.
Sharon Cooper
Fullerton Elementary School
Posted by: Sharon Cooper | October 23, 2007 8:30 PM
Many people have written about the fact that AIM is ridiculous....and it is!! Besides that, what about the fact that the person who masterminded AIM is a Balto. Co. Employee that is copywriting this and making money off of a document that will be mandated from that same county?????
Posted by: J.R. | October 23, 2007 8:53 PM
One might ask how much $$$ BCPS is paying Dr. Dezmund for AIM when she developed it as she worked for BCPS- but also has a copyright on the AIM checklists. This seems more like a self serving push for monatary gain than real concern for communication with parents. Instead of spending more money on another checklist, use the money to check residency on the hundreds of students that attend BCPS and don't live in Baltimore County.
Posted by: meb | October 23, 2007 10:39 PM
The current elementary report card reflects MSPAP-era goals and objectives. We are five years removed from that test! The reading and language portions of the report card do not come close to reflecting the objectives present on the Voluntary State Curriculum--which, for the uninitiated, is absolutely NOT voluntary in Baltimore County.
Teachers have begged for years for the report card to be overhauled. At my school, we were just trained on the "new" report card. Here's what is new: The program is posted online now, rather than on the server. That means the report cards don't need to be shut down and backed up each day of the grading period. Yippee! However, now teachers have to save input grades and comments every time we move from child to child or subject to subject. Also, if two teachers are working on the same report card--but on different computers--only one teacher's entries will be saved. The teacher with the dumped data will have no way of knowing, unless she or he previews every subject of every report card every time she or he saves! Oh, and we can't modify font size on the comments sections, so there won't be enough room for a student's math AND reading teachers to record full comments. The report card program is totally different in appearance and layout than the previous program. Lots of "newness" to absorb! Hurray! We love to be forced to learn (and beta-test!) a brand-new program immediately before we are expected to use it to perform an important part of our jobs.
On the flip side, we still have the very same outdated grading descriptors. Also, we still can't work on reports from home. (I'm trying to decide if that's a drawback or a benefit.) If the server goes down, we'll still have no access to report cards at all.
During training at my school, several of us very quickly discovered the saving, font size, and other glitches. I can't wait to see what happens when we all start tapping away on our antique keyboards at one time. The four computers, monitors, and printer in my classroom are all dated January 2000, as are many of the other computers in our school. Boom! (Or whatever sound nothingness makes...!) I suppose we'll be using chunks of charcoal to record grades on pieces of tree bark according to descriptors that don't match the current curriculum. At least we all already know how coal and bark work. No costly, time-consuming traning will be necessary.
Posted by: KM | October 24, 2007 2:23 AM
As a high school teacher, my concern is about the current lack of parent involvement. Last week was conference night and I only had 3 parents show up. I teach approximately 85 students. Why aren't more parents coming to conference night? We need to focus on ways of getting parents more involved in their child's education. Until then, what is the point of yet another report/checklist? I don't think most parents take the time to read the ones they get already. And if they do, they are not being active in communicating with the school about how they can help their child's progress.
Posted by: Kathryn | October 24, 2007 8:48 AM
Wouldn't that be a question of Ethics?? Everytime I read or see something about AIM my heart sinks. I truely feel that this is just to use a project that was created for a degreed program and so many people will be the ones that have to implement something that they do not believe in.
Posted by: J.R. | October 24, 2007 8:52 AM
I have to second what others have said about parental responsibility. I teach a self contained Special Ed. class of students with behavior problems. When and if I meet the parents (depending on whether or not they have custody, or are in jail, or on the streets doing drugs) it often becomes very clear why the child in my room is such a mess. Parents need to meet teachers halfway if children are to be successful.
Posted by: Theresa | October 24, 2007 10:40 AM
I am just imagining special area teachers completing 4-5 pages of checklists for each of the 600+ students they see. We are all thinking that this is not quite what we bargained for when we went into teaching -- promising to inspire children and change the world. Instead we are overworked and underpaid for the hard work that we do. I am sure I am not alone when I say that I am completely exhausted from working 16-17 hour days. I used to find teaching rewarding and felt like I was making a difference. Now for the most part, I just leave school feeling betrayed by the system and guilty for being made one of their pawns. We have Dibbels, short cycles, assesstrax, msa, hsa, benchmarks, integrated skills and theme tests, and unit tests. The County's answer to an all time low in regards to teacher morale and retention is to add just one more thing to our already full plates-AIM. We are spending countless hours testing and retesting our kids and now they want us to also complete checklists. The resounding question we would all love an answer for-what happens to all of the data??? So much of the data we are told to collect is not used to drive instruction or assist students with the skills they lack. We spend an entire year preparing for the HSA and MSA exams and don’t even receive the results until the summer, so how does that drive instruction or help students? What is even more astonishing is that because these tests are given in early Spring, teachers haven’t even been given adequate time to teach all of the skills presented on the test. Yet, because of the amazing pressure, teachers are expected to teach to the test at a very fast pace to cram it all in, and have little to no time built in to remediate or meet the needs of students who haven’t mastered particular skills. It is irresponsible and unethical to rely as much as we teachers are forced to on a single test. So, to that end the County has now decided to pile on even more assessments so that we teachers who are incapable of knowing our students and what they need, can get a “full picture” of them. What is being done to our kids? We are telling them that they are nothing more than a score! It is not just a matter of workload, which is blatantly obvious and requires attention and reform, but it is also an ethical dilemma. What happened to letting teachers do their job-TEACH??? AIM is just one more endeavor to undermine and distinguish the power of teaching professionals. We teachers have spent time, money, and energy attaining certifications and accelerated degrees in our area of expertise, and yet still our accountability is constantly called into question. This AIM Module has less to do with students and everything to do with the blame game. Someone is going to get very rich off of denigrating the hard work we teachers do, by narrowing it down to a checklist on a few slips of paper. Don’t kid yourself Baltimore County, parents don’t need and will not benefit from AIM. AIM is a subjective checklist that isn’t even aligned with the curriculum and doesn’t offer parents practical and valuable support or advice for how to help their students with the skills they haven’t mastered. What the checklist will really highlight, if it is passed by the Board, is the fact that our children are being rushed through the curriculum at an unfair speed in order to perform on a test. I am so proud to say that after 25+ years of schooling, and 3 teaching certificates, I now fully understand what it means to be an educator and I am ashamed. Teachers, enough is finally enough! It is time to stand up and bring integrity and passion back into our profession. We are teachers and we aren’t being allowed to do our job! The time is now to say NO TO AIM!
Posted by: D.M. | October 24, 2007 9:17 PM
Earlier this week I opened our school's School Improvement Plan and noted that the first item was to implement the AIM Model. After I paused to let my blood pressure and ire subside, and continued to read the plan I realized we already have a reading program in many elementary schools titled AIM. In this case it stands for Academic Intervention Model. This model is not a reporting system, as such, it is a program that actively attempts to raise reading levels through a series of interventions not just checklists.The results are reported to the parents regularly through parent reports and parent conferences. It would be too bad if this initiative would get linked in any way with the initiative proposed by Dr. Dezmon which is not an intervention just a reporting system.
Posted by: bwt | October 25, 2007 9:02 AM
D.M. What a great comment!! I think you have said it all. I too am a seasoned teacher, (31 years). The reason we went to school was to teach. I feel like we each need an individual secretary! Between all that you sited and all the computer skills we need.................somewhere something has gone very wrong!! Hang in there.......we are all in this together!
Posted by: J.R. | October 25, 2007 3:33 PM
AIM is off target. For any government agency to endorse a program that was copyrighted by an employee who will soon be retiring is just bad business sense. We have the VSC which MSDE has given us as a guide to structure our lessons and meet the goals of the state's high stakes tests, now we are going to be asked to use a copyrighted checklist taken straight from the state document. Who will benefit from this material being copyrighted when it has been given to us freely by the state? Noone has to be an expert to know how to use the information from the VSC, but apparantly you do have to have an altenative agenda (retirement money; cushy retirement; consultant position and speaking engagements.) Personally, I've always used the VSC to track students and record mastery- every county assessment has the alingment to courses- should I drag my old documents out and start copyrighting them too? Maybe we're on to something here.....when are they filming the infomercial?
Posted by: Ruman Ocee | October 26, 2007 12:01 PM
I noticed that Barbara Dezmon has copyrighted this program. I also read that she is the assistant to the superintendent of BCPS. Since this material is copyrighted it begs the question, “How will she gain financially if BCPS adopts/purchases this program. I thought I read something about it being free at first. It seems to smell of conflict of interest since she has the ear of the king to whom she is trying to sell her goods. I realize I have made a few assumptions here. Does anyone know how she might gain from this transaction?
Posted by: Carl | October 26, 2007 3:51 PM
I wonder how I managed to graduate from BCPS,and college earn a masters+, raise four children - who also gradeuated from BCPS and college - without MSA, HSA, VSC, short cycles, benchmarks, assessTrax etc. Good teachers know their students. Teachers 25 years ago told me my child's strengths and needs - and they were right! But, they were allowed to teach - what an idea!
In response to Carl - it seems and ethics course should be in Dr. Dezmon's and possibly Dr. Hairston's future. Why the Board would even consider funding this is beyond reason. How can anyone justify paying a BCPS employee any monies to copy the VSC? I don't know it the AIM checklist was 'created' between 9-5 or after regular hours, but I don't get paid extra for any of the work I do before or after school, I thought it was all part of being a teacher.
Can't someone investigate this?
Posted by: meb | October 27, 2007 8:05 PM
Instituting AIM is just another example of the work of leaders who have been out of the classroom too long or never been in one at all. Get with the real world folks. The only parents who will read any of these new reports will be the same ones who already attend Back To School Night and Conference Night, the same ones who actually read and sign Interim Reports and who look at Report Cards. And, no surprise, the ones who have students who are already doing their best. The other 80% of parents are too stressed, too overworked, or too disinterested to bother with any of the data distribution methods which are already in place.
If a parent wants to really know what is going on with their child in school they could: look in their binder and backpacks, read the interims which are sent home 4 times a year, review the report cards which are sent home 4 times a year (so far this is 8 sets of formal data), attend conference night, attend American Education Week, join and attend PTA, and . . . talk to their child. If the majority of parents were actually doing these things and problems still existed, fine, we would need something else. Truth be known, most parents aren't involved at all. Teachers have to nag students to return signed forms and interims. My students often tell me, my mom/dad/aunt/etc. didn't read it, they just signed it. Saddly, students sometimes say, I haven't seen my parent(s) for a few days they're out of town, or they're working, the list goes on.
AIM is just another attempt to put all the responsibility on the teachers. But the bad news is, it isn't going to change anything for the target audience! We need to stop doing this. Parents and students must be responsible for themselves. Most teachers are already doing as much as they can. Leave us alone and let us teach-that is what we love to do!
It's just back to the same old thing, students say it all the time and parents support it: "It's not my fault." This whine is usually followed by, "But I didn't do anything!" Exactly, and that is why many students aren't succeeding, they accept no responsibility and they do nothing. We should not be enabling this!
As a teacher I often think I am the only one interested in whether or not a student succeeds, many parents don't and students seem to be under the false assumption that someone is going to rescue them at the zero hour so they will graduate.
AIM? BCPS is way off target on this one!! Data on graduation from the HSA reports doesn't prompt parents and students to academic action, and this time wasting list of individualized objectives and their reports isn't going to improve anything either.
WE ARE PROFESSIONALS, LISTEN TO US - LEAVE US ALONE AND LET US TEACH!!!!!!!
Posted by: MB | December 10, 2007 6:18 PM
As a former teacher and a parent, I think adding another form for teacher's to spend their time on. Isn't the whole idea of teaching to concentrate on the student's needs and weakenesses? Teachers don't need another piece of useless paperwork to take time away from what they are there to do in the first place...TEACH!
AIM is just a useless busy work for teachers; as if they don't already have enough of that! STOP THE MADNESS! STOP AIM!
Posted by: Karen Hildebrand | December 10, 2007 8:27 PM
I attended a meeting 1 1/2 - 2 yrs. ago where Dr. Dezmon told us in no uncertain terms that AIM was not and would never be mandatory. She had it straight from Dr. Hairston that it was not and would never be mandatory. She had no idea how she could make it any more clear than that--AIM was not and would never be mandatory.
Yesterday, we were told by our principal that AIM is now mandatory, for every student in every subject area. As a professional, I am angry and demoralized because my bosses lied to me. As a parent, I am alarmed that my children are being educated in a system run by liars.
The system is laborious and time consuming. It is redundant and a wasteful use of time and human, physical, and financial resources. It will cause qualified, experienced teachers to leave, if not the profession, the county system. It takes time away from planning effective lessons and interventions and puts it into clicking literally thousands of little boxes.
Posted by: ms | December 18, 2009 10:53 PM