Except when referring to padded cells, when people talk about “rubber rooms” they are as likely as not talking about the New York education system’s reassignment centers, where teachers accused of misconduct bide their time until the district determines what to do with them.
I thought about that when I was confronted with a different sort of educational holding cell: alternative schools.
The school district I grew up in had an alternative school. It was a godsend. It took all (well, most) of the people that were disrupting everything in the regular classrooms and getting them the heck out of the way. I never labored under the illusion that they were getting much an education over there. I didn’t really care, though, because they weren’t getting an education where they were and at least this way they weren’t preventing anybody else from doing so. My perspective changed a little bit when I discovered that a friend of mine (a couple grades back) was sent to one. I never knew what for. I never asked. But he was a bright kid. I sort of gave him my sympathies as politely as I could (“That must have been tough” or something like that), but he actually shrugged it off. I hadn’t realized what a hellish place I thought it to be.
I have a couple of times been given an assignment to Redstone’s alternative school. It isn’t a hellish place. It helps, I suppose, that the school is comparatively underpopulated. When filling in for a social studies teacher for a half-day, I had all of six students over three periods assigned to the class. Only two showed up at all. My second assignment (another half-day) there was for PE. I thought that would be awful, but it wasn’t, really. Thirty kids over two periods. They self-organized and did their own thing.
The reason my only two assignments there have been half-days is that it seems largely staffed by coaches. So they miss half-days when they have some competition halfway across the state. While there are always exceptions, it was my experience that coaches tend to be the least… engaged… of classroom teachers.
This seems an odd allocation of resources. A much higher teacher-to-“student” ratio in order to provide glorified babysitting rather than actual education? It may be more pleasant than you’d thought it would be, but does that make it any less wasteful?
My main thought the first assignment I had was the wastefulness. In this particular district, though, it’s somewhat circumstantial. Too few of these kids to really populate a school or the classrooms within. There’s a little more to it than that, details I won’t bore you with, but the district is in a bit of a jam with overcapacity generally that leads to odd allocations.
Even in the best of scenarios, though, I think that you would still see lower student-to-teacher ratios.
I was thinking something rather different from Burt. Perhaps what such students (and their teachers) need is a much lower student/teacher ratio, so that education instead of babysitting is a possibility? Surely an overcrowded alternative school is not likely to do any of its participants any good?
Holy crap… where did the rest of this post go? There was a lot more here in my draft. I must have accidentally deleted it. Expect a follow-up.
Wow, great blog.Really looking forward to read more. Cool.