By Tracey
I’ve always been taught that a healthy dose of competition
is a good thing. It can motivate
you and help you to set and reach goals for yourself. We value it in the marketplace as it can encourage
innovation and lead to better products and services. But does it have a role in education?
You know the saying "If these walls could talk"? Well, they do. Our faces talk too, and our bodies, and sometimes our voices say something other than our words. As Mark has pointed out on other posts, how we treat students matters to them.
This sign was on the door of a good teacher during one of our building's big tardy sweeps where kids have to check in with the office if they're late. This sign is a good example of how we disrespect kids without knowing it. For many students, being disrespected by a teacher is reason enough to quit.
By Mark
It is a rare day when watching FoxNews inspires me to be a better teacher.
Obama's recent tete-a-tete with Bret Baier on FoxNews certainly wasn't the first nor will it be the last evidence that our country has lost its capacity for reasoned discourse, whether the home court is labeled conservative or liberal. Neither side is free of culpability. Why is it that we cannot speak to one another, civilly disagree, offer substantive evidence to support our own positions–rather than treat a conversation as a battle to be waged, where ad hominem attacks or unsubstantiated accusations rule the rhetoric? It is great for when I teach rhetorical fallacies, but as a citizen I'm sick of it.
So FoxNews has helped me revise instructional goals from here forward: in every unit I plan to include opportunities to teach students how to disagree with civility and reason. Whether it's a discussion about a bona fide controversial topic like healthcare or the Iraq War or stem cell research, which all come up during our unit on research and persuasion…or whether we think Romeo or Juliet was more to blame for their mutual tragedy… I pledge to encourage dissent amongst my ranks; I pledge to challenge every student to defend their position with rational grace (regardless of my personal convictions on the issue); and in the process TEACH my students that it is okay to disagree but for crying out loud it isn't okay to interrupt.
Sheesh. How many of our problems would be solved if we would just listen to each other and use our silence to consider other perspectives rather than to ready our next offense.
By Tom
I read the whole thing. All forty-one pages. Twice. And frankly, I kinda like Obama's "A Blueprint for Reform." It's not as cool as "A Blueprint for the Batmobile" (pictured to the left) but it's a heck of a lot cooler than the mess the last president left in his wake.
Let's take a closer look at some of the highlights:
In the (autographed!) introduction, Obama states "My Administration’s blueprint for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is not only a plan to renovate a flawed law, but also an outline for a re-envisioned federal role in education."And he's not just saying that. This is by far the boldest move since 1965, when the federal government first stepped into the education arena. Obama knows that that he can't directly affect schools, but what he can do is use money, lots of it, as leverage to get school systems to do what he wants.
by Brian
Our students just finished taking the renamed high stakes state tests. The High School Proficiency Exam (HSPE) has replaced the WASL. Not quite what the kids were hoping when Randy Dorn said he was getting rid of the WASL. This week it was Reading and Writing; next month will be Math and Science. It looks increasingly likely that the scores our students achieve on these tests will be used in our yearly evaluation. In Florida it's possible that teachers' salaries will also be tied to test results. Half of their salaries may be tied to their state comprehensive and end-of-course exams. Which sounds not so much like merit pay, but de-merit pay. Instead of paying good teachers more, they'll pay teachers whose students underachieve less. And the drum beat to fire bad teachers goes on. (See Tom's post.)The cover of the March 15 Newsweek is a blackboard covered with the sentence: We must fire bad teachers.
So I was reading an article by George Packer on President Obama's first year in office in the March 15 edition of The New Yorker and I came upon an amazing anecdote. Packer was writing about Obama's frustration at being unable to hold the banks fully to account for the financial collapse. Apparently Obama would have been happy if Timothy Geithner, his Treasury Secretary, had recommended the top bank officials be held accountable by forcing entire management teams out of their jobs. Packer writes: Geithner felt that firing the leadership of the bailed-out banks would ultimately cost taxpayers money, owing to the loss of expertise, and would inevitably punish executives who were not to blame. The President reluctantly agreed. "You always admire someone willing to do the responsible thing, even when it is terrible politics," Sperling (a counsellor to Geithner) said. "But you could see how frustrated he was."
Too bad Arne Duncan and Geithner can't trade jobs. Duncan likes firing people, and he doesn't mind losing expertise or punishing teachers who are not to blame.
It's starting to get to me. Fire the teachers, but give the bankers another bonus.
By Kristin
Well, as we might have guessed, things have started to fall apart at Central Falls High School.
While I'm not one to shy away from taking a side, today I'm not going to write about whether the teachers should be fired or not. Instead, I'm going to write about the fact that when Superintendent Frances Gallo searched Central Falls High School one night in response to a rumor that there was an effigy of Obama hanging somewhere, she found it, hanging upside down on a white board and holding a sign that read, "Fire Central Falls Teachers."
It made me think of how we sometimes overstep that line between protecting our students and trying to rally them. The students sitting in our rooms are not our colleagues or friends. They are not our troops. There's a line that teachers shouldn't cross, even though it can be tempting.
Taking a bold stance in favor of equality, The Texas Board of Education has voted to include different cultures and political viewpoints in their history textbooks. Just kidding! Actually, they voted to revise the texts in order to erase the separation between church and state, emphasize the Christian origins of the United States, and put the "free enterprise system" in a more positive light. A final vote will happen in May, and then textbook companies will work furiously to fulfill the revised-history textbook orders of this important customer.
In a strongly worded condemnation of this moment in Texas history, the editors of The New York Times point out that curriculum should be "chosen for its educational value, not politics or ideology." But who can trust The New York Times?
By Tom
Let's take another look at Race to the Top, (RT3) but this time from a student's perspective.
RT3, the centerpiece of the Obama administration's educational policy, is a federal initiative in which states compete for grant money by showing that they have put into place certain school reform measures that the administration values. Among these measures are liberal provisions for charter schools, merit pay for teachers based in part on student test scores and state-level authority to take over so-called "failing schools."
For the sake of argument, let's pretend that these provisions actually add value to a state's school system. And for the sake of comparison, let's consider two different states, who've taken two different approaches to the administration's challenge: Illinois and Washington.
By Kristin
By Mark
My goal is neither to roast this teacher nor defend his practice. The video above clearly doesn't give the whole story. However, it raises an question with which I myself have battled: when a teacher disagrees with a colleague's classroom practice, how should this be handled?
We've all been there. A kid comes in and complains about another teacher. We take the high road, try to give the kid strategies for conflict resolution, and hopefully, we don't take sides. If you're like me, you occasionally hear about a colleague's questionable discipline or off-target comments–we must of course take what students say with a grain of salt. But what if a kid hands you a paper from another class with feedback like what was given above? And worse, what if it isn't an isolated event, but something you've seen as a pattern in this teacher's behavior? Can, or should, a teacher try to influence the questionable classroom practices of a colleague?
What would you do? What should the administration do?