“Since we can’t fire poverty, we can’t fire students, and we can’t fire parents, all that is left is to fire teachers.”~ Diane Ravitch
NCLB Advocate Shifts Position
Diane Ravitch: First, Let's Fire All the Teachers
Common Dreams: Obama Backs Rewarding Districts that Police Failing Schools
Education Week: Obama Gets Involved in R.I Teacher-Firing Drama
Washington Post: Class Struggle (Jay Mathews): Obama Wrong, Weingarten Right
Maeve Maddox on Language and Popular Culture: Teachers as Scapegoats
The Sydney Morning Herald: Now the Class Scapegoat is the Teacher
J.B. Fabiano: Why Do Teachers Have to Be the Scapegoat of Public Education?
2 comments:
I would like to scapegoat one kind of teacher in particular. Maybe you've seen them, maybe you have a few of these in your building. They have no business working with students. Here are some traits of these teachers:
- Refuse to work outside the hours of 7:30am - 2:30pm unless paid extra.
- Are still using the same file cabinets of worksheets they were 10 years ago. (Or worse, they are still using the worksheets that were in the cabinet when they were first hired!)
- Have not taken an education course in the last 3 years.
- Have not been to a workshop or voluntary teacher training in the past 3 years.
- Are unable to explain to a student or parent what "an 82% on the assignment" really means, and what that score tells the student about how to improve.
- Still thinks laptops in the classroom is "cutting edge technology".
- Complains about how "ready" the students are instead of assessing current levels of understanding and working with the student to get them back on track.
- Spends more time correcting than having one-on-one conversations with students about their work. (Not lectures... conversations.)
- Can't deal with teenagers outside the classroom. (Hey, if they can't just hang out, why should I believe they can deliver content?)
- Has less than 9 graded assignments in the gradebook per quarter, and updates their online gradebook less than once a week.
It's time to get the bad apples, and the stale apples, out of the building so the good ones can shine!
-- Mark
You are clueless as to what goes on in a school, in the life of teachers and students.
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