The SDP should be a scary movie

Forget his reality show; Tony Danza ought to be making a horror film about the Philadelphia School District. Today was the first day of school for teachers, and inevitably all the roommates have arrived home with horror stories about new developments at their schools as of today. My roommate who teaches 9th grade English might have to cover a period of Spanish because there might not be a teacher hired for that position at all this school year. My roommate who teaches Spanish might have to cover a period of corrective reading (or corrective math...who knows which?), for which he has no training. On top of that, in all the high schools, students will be re-rostered after about 2 weeks of school once they have taken tests to determine whether they need to be in a corrective reading or corrective math class (which essentially is the curriculum used in special ed classrooms). My roommate who teaches 7th grade English won't have a curriculum until October, and is expected to just work with week-to-week "themes" until then. I just found out we will be doing gendered classes, meaning I will see all my boys in each grade in one class, and all my girls in each grade the next day, which means that in some classes I will have many more students than I have desks due to disproportionate numbers of girls versus boys. Even my roommate at a relatively awesome charter school is now on a cart in 3 different classrooms at his school.

And the kicker? Because they don't "have the funds" to post to hire a new English teacher at another friend's high school, she now has classes that number 65 (at least) on her rosters. They hope to have the classes down to "normal size" by October- based on massive truancy, I suppose...

Just how do they expect our kids to learn in this logistical mess?? When this is the best the educated, intelligent adults who are supposed to be running things around here can do, what can we hope for for the students who are stuck in this system?

However, not all hope is lost. Almost all of my roommates are currently working through ways to problem solve these new challenges- if we could all approach challenges in teaching, even ones that seem insurmountable, like that, we would eventually make the widespread changes we so desperately need around here. Here's hoping that at some point I'm in a position with enough power to say that and have it mean something.