Colleen Hroncich
Colleen Hroncich
Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota is the poorest area in the nation, says Mary Jo Fairhead, a former public school teacher who grew up on the reservation. “I love it, but there are a lot of life issues,” she explains. “A lot of poverty, a lot of addiction issues. Our kids struggle with suicide and high dropout rates. Just a lot of hard things. And that’s really why I became a teacher—because I wanted to help kids.”
But when she got to the classroom, she didn’t feel like she was really helping. “Class sizes were huge, and I couldn’t get real meaningful lessons planned because I was just putting out fires all the time,” she recalls. “I got really frustrated with how the system was set up and the kids I was seeing falling through the cracks.” Her frustrations—with the discipline techniques, the structure of the day, the curriculum, and all the testing—pushed her to quit teaching.
After being home with her kids for a few years, she took a position as principal of a small preK‑8 public school. Mary Jo says she was excited about the job because, as principal, she figured she’d be able to do things the way she thought they should be done. “I really did enjoy that job. It was so hard emotionally, but I felt like we were doing some really good things. The kids were really making progress, and the teachers felt comfortable with me,” she says.
The main downside was the amount of testing they had to do—because their test scores were low, the kids had to do even more testing. “We were testing like five to six weeks out of the year, and that wasn’t even including the progress monitoring,” she says. “We had benchmark, we had the state testing, » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/friday-feature-onward-learning