ABSTRACT
An enormous leap of imagination is needed to connect the provisions of HB
72, the state’s first comprehensive school legislation since the Gilmer-Aiken Act
of the 1940s, to the problems of schools identified by the magnet teachers and
other good teachers. The checklist of teacher behaviors for Career Ladder
advancement gave no hint how a teacher should be evaluated who used work-
sheets to count for the required 40 percent lab time in her science course
because there are only two or three lighted microscopes for a class of thirty stu-
dents. It provided no suggestion whether a teacher who did not send students
to the library for history class should be seen as lazy, as frustrated because the
school has no library, or as generous and enterprising because she brought her
own books from home for her students to use. As state testing of children
became incorporated into the teacher assessment system, there was no provi-
sion for an asterisk by test scores of those students whose schools run out of
photocopy paper in March and textbooks in September. The conditions of
teaching that the magnet teachers had to overcome could not be solved by
teacher checklists, nor by statewide testing of children, longer school years, or
praise words. Far less would the legislation solve the problems of the neighbor-
hood schools many of their magnet students had left behind, where student test
scores hovered in the 40 to 60 percentile range (scores that represented the stu-
dents still in school after 25 to 30 percent had dropped out before ever getting
to the final years of high school). Students reported in interviews that they
managed to get all the way to high school, even a magnet school, without read-
ing a whole book. Their teachers would be asked to prepare them for multiple-
choice statewide tests and to do so by carrying out two-or three-dozen
operations in a single class period if those teachers were to receive high marks
on the Career Ladder assessment. HB 72 added five days to the school year, then
took away more than that many with added standardized testing days.
