Kander hears about classroom issues at roundtable with area educators

Discussion centered around standardized testing and government overreach during a meeting Saturday between local educators in Cape Girardeau and Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Jason Kander.

Kander, who is running to unseat U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt and has been holding similar roundtables elsewhere in the state, asked the teachers what their feelings were about education, specifically in Southeast Missouri.

The panel, which included public-school teachers from Jackson to East Prairie, expressed concern about the effects of standardized tests and Annual Yearly Progress benchmarks. Most of the teachers said standardized tests are good in theory but too often end up taking a disproportionate amount of class time.

“Every child learns differently,” said retired Jefferson Elementary principal Mark Cook. “It’s not a cop-out; it’s the truth.”

Furthermore, the teachers said, it’s not always accurate or useful to measure students in Southeast Missouri against contemporaries elsewhere in the state.

Shaelynn Norwald, who teaches third grade in East Prairie, recalled watching her students cry onto their answer sheets during Missouri Assessment Program testing, only to share in their anxiety when the results ranked her students well below third-graders in Ladue, Missouri, an affluent St. Louis suburb.

“Ladue isn’t Mississippi County, Missouri,” she said, explaining at her school, many students struggle with home stability, poverty and hunger.

She said when her school scored low, it felt as though Washington, D.C., politicians were “pointing fingers” at her and her colleagues for not doing their jobs.

“I think testing is OK, and we have some great tests,” Cook said. “Let’s just not have them be so high-stakes.”

Kander acknowledged the unique obstacles faced by schools in low-income districts under current regulations and mentioned how tax cuts for the middle class could help students by helping their families.

“We should have a high expectation,” he said. “But you make sure schools and students and communities are equipped to meet those standards.”

During the discussion, none of the educators talked about teachers’ salaries until Kander asked about them, which Kander said indicated their priorities.

“It’s impossible to sit down with a group of teachers ... and not come away with a reaffirmed sense of how much they really care about [students],” Kander said.

He said instead of making choices for school districts from hundreds of miles away, “Washington needs to make sure they’re empowering teachers.”

“Education is not an island,” he said, citing an higher minimum wage, college affordability and taxes as viable avenues to effect positive change in education from outside the boundaries of the typical education debates.

“Policymakers have a responsibility to look at the whole picture,” he said.

tgraef@semissourian.com

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