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Bulletin Boards Gone Berserk
As the educational standards movement has required students to master ever-longer lists of skills--and required teachers to explain exactly how they are teaching them--bulletin boards have become an intensely monitored showplace for progress. They are especially important in low-performing schools, which are constantly scrutinized by city and state education officials and under heavy pressure to show improvement.
"When I go into a school, bulletin boards give me the first clues as to what is going on in the classrooms," said Dr. Sandra Kase, the supervising superintendent of the Chancellor's District, which encompasses 46 low-performing schools around the city. "They're also a wonderful way for children and teachers to feel very good about what they have done." . . .
Teachers, who are usually responsible for the bulletin boards just outside their classrooms and several others inside, complain that administrators dwell too much on how the boards look. At some schools, they say, curriculum specialists assigned to help inexperienced teachers with lesson plans serve as decorators in chief, cutting out construction-paper figures and letters to adorn the boards. Sometimes, teachers say, principals make them redo boards that are judged too quirky or dull. . . .
[At P.S. 91. in the Bronx] next to each board is a "task card" explaining the assignment, and a separate explanation of which state learning standards it meets. A note giving students detailed feedback and assigning them a number from one to four, with four being "performing above standards" and one being "demonstrates no evidence of proficiency," was attached to every piece of work. . . .
In [school principal]Ms. Centeno's mind, those who consider it overkill to require so much "clarity of purpose," to use her phrase, need only look back to the days before standards, when she said teachers and students were like players in a game of "pin the tail on the donkey."
"It was like getting blindfolded and spun around, that's how much direction you got," she said. "There's a lot more thinking that goes into teaching now."
— Abby Goodnough
Judging a School by Its Posters
The New York Times
June 18, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/18/nyregion/18BULL.html
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
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