Lest you all forget, my principal was a 28 year old youngster with a face as smooth as a babies butt. She has very little worldly wisdom, and scant teaching experience. She willfully damaged my career, and manipulated my students to do so. I am extremely disappointed with the Houston ISD principal selection process. It is my firm belief that Terry Grier scraped her up out of the bowels of the charter school world as a kind of experiment; from my perspective this act was irresponsible and careless. He damaged my colleagues, and my students, and subjected all of us to an unsafe and hostile work environment where the battle came first and the student's were used as pawns, and playthings, by three insecure women with no professional ethics whatsoever.
Even though I had built strong relationships with my students, explained misunderstandings crafted by my inexperienced and unprofessional administration, and documented steady academic and behavioral growth, my principal still insisted on placing me on a Prescriptive Plan for Assistance (PPA or Growth Plan) that only spanned a period of two weeks.
Because her motives had nothing to do with student achievement, and everything to do with checking off a "to do" list of items that would facilitate my termination, nothing was gained. The end result of my so-called "growth plan" was this poorly written document that clearly illustrates my principal's lack of professionalism, and abscence of content knowledge.
For the next series of blog posts, I will take you, my valuable reader, through this observation form one section at a time explaining the circumstances, and providing the true facts.
This observation of my teaching style took place during my 8th period class. My principal intentionally stacked my 8th period class with an array of very challenging students who were always very sick of school by 3:15 in the afternoon. They still needed to maintain discipline and energy until my class dismissed at 4:15 in the afternoon.
Manipulating students, in any form, in order to diminish student achievement, and damage classroom management because you are after the teacher is an unethical act beyond description. Any administrator, or counselor, that engages in this type of hateful behavior should be subjected to a full TEA investigation. If anyone is willing to investigate my principal and her administration, I would be happy to assist them.
I am willing to do anything lawful and reasonable to end the egregious and irresponsible practices I witnessed at my Apollo High School. What my fellow teachers, and students, endured was inexcusable and ridiculous. Even, just as a parent, I could scarcely stomach the nonsense at Kashmere. To this day, I worry about the students that are left behind in that negative, punitive, and unprofessional environment.
