Every year since the introduction of Race to the Top, I wait in high anticipation to see whether President Obama will recognize how demoralizing this program has been to the nation’s educators. I keep hoping he will acknowledge that it has intensified the punitive effects of No Child Left Behind, that its demand to evaluate teachers by the test scores of their students has no evidence to support it, that its support for charter schools has unleashed an unprecedented wave of privatization, that its encouragement of merit pay has led to repeated failures, and that it has promoted teaching to the test and narrowing the curriculum. President Bush would have loved to get the heavy-handed accountability and privatization features of Race to the Top into his own legislation, but Congressional Democrats in 2001 would never have permitted it.
Every year I have been disappointed. (Not surprisingly, he did not take my advice, other than in his advocacy for early childhood education.)
Last night was not as bad as two years ago, when the President claimed that Race to the Top was developed by teachers and principals and local communities. He made it sound as though the administration had stumbled upon these wonderful grassroots ideas, when in fact the Race to the Top plan was designed in Arne Duncan’s office by insiders from the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the NewSchools Venture Fund and a small number of other insiders in the corporate reform movement. In fact, the design of Race to the Top was spelled out in a document released by the Broad Foundation in April 2009 (Race to the Top was announced in July 2009), and no one has ever confused the Broad Foundation with the grassroots and local communities.
Then there was the State of the Union address in 2012 when the President said he didn’t want teachers to teach to the test, and said in the next sentence that he wanted teachers to be rewarded for results and removed for not getting results. Talk about mixed messages! So teachers will be rewarded if their students get higher scores but fired if their students don’t get higher scores. But don’t teach to the tests that determine whether you get a bonus or get fired.
But on to last night.
The President was great on gun control. Not so impressive on education.
The President’s customary praise for Race to the Top was muted, which was a good sign. He said that RTTT had caused states to improve their curriculum and standards, meaning the adoption of Common Core, about which the jury (evidence) is still out.
He made a strong and persuasive plea for high-quality preschool for all, which made many people (including me) very happy.
He said something about encouraging new high-tech programs for high schools so that students are ready for the workforce, as the Germans do. It was not clear to me what new program he has in mind or how it relates to the Common Core. It was actually incoherent because in the past he has said he wants the U.S. to have the highest college graduation rate in the world, but Germany has a far lower college graduation rate than ours. So, does he want the best high school workforce training programs, like Germany’s or the highest college graduation rate in the world, like Korea?
And most puzzling of all was his rhetoric about higher education.
Here is the logic:
Higher education is very important (agreed).
Higher education costs too much (agreed).
The government won’t continue to subsidize the rising cost of tuition (why not? States have increasingly shifted the burden of college costs to students in recent years, which is why it costs more). By the way, during the last campaign, Romney’s white paper on education said the same thing: If you raise government subsidies, the universities will raise their tuition. So don’t give students any more assistance with their debts.
Colleges and universities should cut their costs (he didn’t say how; 70% of faculty in higher education are adjuncts, or “contingent faculty,” working for subsistence wages).
The federal government will publish a scorecard to identify the best combination of quality and costs, and students will flock to the institutions where they get the best deal. (So now the U.S. Department of Education will compete with the annual rankings published by U.S. News & World Report?).
Here is the scorecard, which I tried just now.
I live in New York City. I put in my zip code and asked for a list of colleges within 20 miles of my home address. I got no results.
I asked for a small liberal arts college–1,000-5,000 students–and got no results.
I put in the name of a small liberal arts college about 3 miles from my home and got no results.
Maybe it will work for you.
Ah, well, first-day bugs.
Before Speech : Big Money Rules
After Speech : Big Money Rules
All the SOSO SOTU speeches in the world will change absolutely nothing so long as 90% of the people’s so-called representatives in that chamber are more worried about the State Of Their Stock Portfolios (SOTSP) than the things the rest of us care about.
Diane,
What’s the best question(s) for me to ask the following panel at this month’s (2/27) LA Education Summit featuring the self proclaimed “Education Mayors”: Cory Booker of Newark, Rahm Emanuel of Chicago and Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles?
Also, same inquiry for the following panel featuring:
Eli Broad, Dr. John Deasy, Móníca Garcia, and Casey Wasserman,
Please reply, so I can be prepared.
thank you,
Kadar Lewis
Personally, I want to know, “How can you sleep at night?” or, better yet, “Aren’t you worried about which direction you’re headed in the next life?”, but I suppose those wouldn’t go over too well. Plus, of course, as utterly sociopathic as they all are, I’m sure they sleep just fine and are not, in fact, worried about the afterlife.
Why do you advocate privatization when the evidence shows that charters perform no better on average than public schools? Are you concerned about the corruption and waste associated with deregulation? Public schools have been a cornerstone of our democracy for more than a century; why would you work to privatize them? Why do you advocate for policies that have no evidence to support them? Do you know that no other country evaluates teachers based on the test scores of their students? Are you aware that merit pay has failed in every test of it? Why do you take bad ideas and call them “reform”?
Thanks for the excellent questions.
I think I will hit my “Manchurian Elected official” school board member who advocates for the parent trigger, vouchers, testing, accountability etc. with these.
Oh, wait, she is also my boss, I suppose.
I will get someone else to send these questions in.
thank you so much. I will let you know how it goes, how many questions I’m able to ask, and their responses, if any.
LOVE THIS BLOG.
One more thing, sorry to bother, but what research report(s) can I quote to support my questions? CREDO study? What else?
Thank you in advance.
I’m also wondering which studies are favorites of Dr. Ravitch.
I’m well aware of Vanderbilt’s experiment where merit pay was used as an independent variable with the results showing no statistically significant difference in “achievement” (as measured by test scores).
Considering what happened in DC though, maybe I’ll re-read it to see if they controlled for cheating.
http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2010/09/teacher-performance-pay/
Read the paperback version of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” for my take on research. These days, I like the work that Bruce Baker of Rutgers is doing on charters, Richard Rothstein on the effects of poverty, Linda Darling-Hammond and Jesse Rothstein on value-added assessment, Matt Di Carlo on many topics.
I don’t know why anyone would bother to listen/watch what any president would have to say, especially one that has shown he is 99 percent ‘talk’ and 1 percent ‘do.’ It’s just so irrelevant. The best thing any president can do for education is get out of our way, and none of them will do that. So whatever plans/programs they might have in mind, it’s meaningless to me. None of it will help. No, I didn’t watch any of it. I did catch a few minutes of Rubio and I saw him desperately reach for a drink. That was funny. Presidents talking about education is not funny.
Well said. I have compared Obama (and most politicians, for that matter), to a glib teenager talking his parents into getting him a car. He promises the moon: he’ll keep his grades up, he’ll be in by 10:00, he’ll keep his room clean and help with the household chores, he’ll do the shopping, he’ll take his little sister to dance practice and Grandma to church and on and on…
None of that ever happens, but Mom and Dad never take away the car keys because whenever they confront him he has so many sincere reasons why, despite his best intentions, he hasn’t been able to uphold his promises, and he so eloquently and stirringly re-promises all that he’s promised before and more.
And then he goes right about doing what he’s been doing all along, laughing at Mom and Dad for being such gullible fools.
Best not to listen to the speeches at all, but just watch the actions.
Great analogy!
I told an administrator that we are not preparing the students for the world of work. His answer was, “That is not our job.” The way things stand today, I guess he is right.
… incoherent … does he want the best high school workforce training programs, like Germany’s or the highest college graduation rate in the world, like Korea?
Thanks. Wouldn’t “Return on Education Investment” analysis catch this contradiction? Doesn’t US Ed have a role to ensure thoughtful policy analysis before (half-baked?) ideas become part of SOTU?
On the subject of “teaching to the test,” and if I may rant for a bit . . .
I’m right now in the process of trying to cobble together some sense of what my daughter will be required to know for the 2013 Grade 4 Common Core Mathematics Test in NY. I’m doing this because I’ve learned that there are large sections of material that she has not yet been taught. So my wife and I are going to have to do it ourselves.
I don’t think I can express how frustrating it is to know that a very high-stakes test is coming down the pike in two months, yet to not have a clear sense of what that test will cover, and to have zero confidence that the material has even been taught yet. So I want to just note my total rage at everyone who’s done their part over the years to make this happen, including NY’s state legislature and governors, Regents, the State Education Department, the NYC DOE, Mayor Bloomberg, and everyone who either supported or set the stage for No Child Left Behind. That includes Dr. Ravitch and all of the education-policy analysts who made their livings in the 1980s and 1990s convincing politicians and voters that America’s schools were broken and that “standards” were the answer. Well, we’ve sure got standards now. Thank God for them!
Oh, and I’d also like an apology from all the academics who’ve worked so hard over the past few decades to reform the way mathematics is taught, so my daughter could find herself in 2013 being taught TERC math with no textbook.
When you say “high-stakes”, what are the stakes for her? If she doesn’t pass, will she be held back or put in a remedial program or what?
The test is a major factor in middle school admissions in NYC. Be glad you don’t live here.
To readingexchange: the downside of opting out is too large, unfortunately. As my rant above indicates, it would be an understatement to say that I would prefer not to teach to this test at home. But I don’t have any philosophical problems with my daughter achieving a solid understanding of fractions and decimal notation in grade 4. And at this point, I’m not confident that she would ever be taught this stuff at school, at least not with individualized attention.
Ah. As much as I support public education in general, I loathe the magnet/selective enrollment system. One test in fourth grade shouldn’t determine what kind of middle school education a child is able to get. All public schools should provide all kids with a “magnet school” quality education. My sympathies – you’re between a rock and a hard place.
Here in RI, the tests are high stakes only for the teachers. I (jokingly?) told my 12-year-old son to tell his teacher that if she doesn’t give him $25, he’s going to zig-zag the PARCC. Kids are great.
Ha! This is what I’m talking about regarding the reaction in RI when it comes to using the NECAP (which will be replaced by the PARCC next year) to bar kids from graduating:
http://news.providencejournal.com/breaking-news/2013/02/student-zombies-march-on-ri-department-of-education-in-protest.html
DO NOT spend time teaching to the test at home. You are victimizing your daughter, at the very least, a second time. Hug her and write her a note opting her out of this test.
I concur. Don’t let your daughter be exploited by the testing industry that is now profiting from the high stakes and misuse of these assessments.
So now there’s going to be a “scorecard” for colleges and universities? Sounds a little too much like something that would happen in K-12. College shouldn’t be the new high school. What’s next? Are we going to go from the “Everybody needs a college degree” mentality to an “Everybody needs to go to graduate school” one (if we aren’t there already)? There’s too much credentializing without any knowledge that comes from actual learning.
And really, what is the issue with higher education costs? There seem to be fewer and fewer tenure track positions, and don’t get me started on the increasing lack of faculty governance.
I would also have a lot more respect for NEA if they hadn’t endorsed anyone due to bad education policies. It could have sent a message.
DOE scorecard for colleges and universities –> professors and faculty scorecard for colleges and universities –> high-stakes testing for colleges and universities –> common curriculum for colleges and universities (developed by governor ALEC of course) –> common tests for colleges and universities –> merit pay for colleges and universities –> “worst US college professor” story in LA Times –> suicides of professors at colleges and universities –> charters for colleges and universities –> Zuckerberg donating billions to colleges and universities in NJ –> Gates video taping professors at colleges and universities to determine why the best professors are the best –> Rhee forming her own set of charter colleges in every state (“U are welcome at Rhee U”) –> US being ranked worst in world for colleges and universities.
Did I leave anything out?
First, start off with “US ranked best in world for colleges and universities” because the impetus of the Dept of Ed today is to fix what is not broken. Since DoE is now competing with US News and World Report, as Diane mentioned, here’s their report based on data from the London based QS World University Rankings: http://www.usnews.com/education/worlds-best-universities-rankings/top-400-universities-in-the-world
I’m afraid that is the formula mathcs.
In New York City, where basically everything is competitive, “getting into” public middle school is supposedly decided by scores on the state tests given to 4th graders. Many neightborhoods with robust elementary school communties do not have zoned middle schools. My daughter must do well on those tests if she wants to attend the IS that is upstairs from her zoned elementary school. Kids who want go to a magnet school for an interest (say, science) must get over 4s (highest scores) on both math and ELA just for the privilege of taking _another_ test to perhaps qualify for a specialized middle school.
The city may accept some portfolio alternative for opted out kids in terms of advancing to the next grade but not for the middle school sweepstakes. If you opt out, the BOE decides where your child goes to middle school.
Even without any additional pressure from parents, kids who have any sense of direction or interest related to their own school experience may worry about it all coming down to those tests. Each wacky, ill considered question has the potential to alter your future.
My daughters school does very little test prep and does offer art, music, dance, science, PE and wonderful, deep, project-based units in social studies. They are offloading some the testing strain onto their typically overachieving parents. I think is a pretty good solution (I want my daughter to love school.) But it’s why many parents and a raft of tutors are scrambling for that “missing” curriculum.
All of this (having the scores count when it comes to student placement) is very interesting. It gives teeth to the standardized testing apparatus but it runs the risk of losing the support of the parents. Here in RI the kids’ scores don’t seem to affect them at all (there is some kicking around about not allowing students who score a “1” on the PARCC to graduate but parents are up in arms about it and I don’t see it going anywhere).
“It gives teeth to the standardized testing apparatus but it runs the risk of losing the support of the parents.”
The apparatus definitely has teeth, and I would be surprised to find a single parent at my children’s school who “supports” the beast. But there’s no indication that the beast needs our support.
Flerper, it may well be that the disease has advanced further in your area than it has here. Again, we see continued parental pushback against using “the test” as barrier to high school graduation here. I’ll have to pay attention though as my own kids are 12, 7, 5, and 1.
I remember in another testing thread, the term “arms race” coming up. If stakes are high for the students – especially in a way that is aligned to some personal competitive goal outside of the current school experience, then the tests become a measurement of ability to compete rather than what has been learned.
Ability to compete in this case also maps right onto SES and educational status of the parents. Have you been sending your high achieving children to tutoring since kindergarten to make them even more high achieving? Do you teach your 4th grade children to multiply fractions in your family time?
This can be ugly between parents and students in the same school community – families are subjected to stack ranking just as their teachers will be.
The NYC public school experience is starting to resemble that of Japan or South Korea.
My above comment should have fallen into the thread below the one posted by “Flerper”
District 2 in the house.
Yeah! We’re not as close to the Capitol as District 1, but we supply most of the Peacemakers
/Hunger Games humor – not inappropriate as “testing season” comes upon us.
“/Hunger Games humor – not inappropriate as “testing season” comes upon us.”
I think you have the makings of an op ed piece.
Once again the president disappointed and I didn’t find his praise for RTTT muted at all. The fact that he insisted on complimenting it just proves he is not aware of any emails, letters or phone calls on the subject. I wasn’t sure what he meant about getting our students ready. At first I thought he was talking about vocational courses which also prepares for well-paying careers. But he wasn’t clear.
I am paranoid and mean spirited enough to wonder if the new push for universal Pre-K is a response to feedback that kindergarteners just don’t seem to be ready to handle Common Core Standards for their grade.
Still, it could be great for the nation, assuming preschoolers don’t have to graph cartesian coordinates at 3 or anything.
I had similar thoughts, but I’m paranoid enough to go further. The pre-K standardized testing market could be pretty lucrative for some of Obama’s buddies. And might we see charter preschools?
I’m an Early Childhood Education (ECE) specialist and I shudder at the thought of the federal government having its hands in ECE. I believe we are very likely to see the primary curriculum further pushed down into pre-primary education, and high-stakes testing there, too.
I don’t think we’re likely to see a rush to open separate free-standing charter preschools though, because that’s not the age of compulsory education, so governments don’t pay much for it. In states that have universal preschool, it’s voluntary for families to send their kids there and states typically pay just for half-day programs (i.e., 2 1/2 hours).
Many working families need full day care, so most existing universal preschool programs are situated in private child care centers which provide all day care and have a variety of funding streams (district funds for half day PreK, state funds for subsidized child care, federal food program, parent fees, etc.). However, charters like KIPP have already expanded to include preschool programs in their elementary schools.
So I went to the scorecard. It tells me nothing. I don’t understand the purpose. How are those statistics supposed to inform a decision about choosing a college? How utterly ridiculous.
I did better than Diane. I got 2 institutions within 10 miles of my house (but not the closest one, a local community college that offeres coursework in the occupation I entered): Stanford University and Foothill Community College. Not surprisingly, the average cost of Stanford was more (3 times) than attending Foothill. That might scare low-income families off because you have to know that the average is misleading for Stanford because the tuition (which just went up to more than $ 50,000 a year) is heavily subsidized according to familiy income. Foothill students have a higher default rate (higher than the national average even) on student loans than Stanford. I’m not sure that these are the most important things I would want to know about an institution top send my child to. Or even if the information provides an adequate picture of affordability. And I assure you that none of these were on my daughter’s list when she was researching college. She wanted to know about the intellectual climate and degree of social tolerance.
Although we disagree on many things, I agree with your positions on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race To The Top. Having the federal government dictate to the states about how to educate our children is an overreach of power not sanctioned in the Constitution. Unfortunately, the federal government has the power of money to enforce their priorities, although it is the states and local school boards which should be preeminent in curriculum choice.
What is even more interesting is that based on a FOIA I filed with DOE, they haven’t got any true record of how many people in the Department have an education background, whether teachers or administrators. Who is making decisions affecting the education of our children? It is probably the individuals and corporations you speak about. And we are paying bureaucrats in DC who have minimal knowledge of education to oversee our children’s futures.
Please read, “Yes, We Are STUPID in America!”. It refers to just what you are discussing here.
Diane, I’m a admirer of your work, courage, wit, and mind, and have been since your conversion experience. In today’s excellent piece on the State of the Union, you stated: “in fact the Race to the Top plan was designed in Arne Duncan’s office by insiders from the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the NewSchools Venture Fund and a small number of other insiders in the corporate reform movement.” Not because I doubt, but because I’d like to share, could you give some links to your sources? Please?
David, I appreciate your skepticism. Read the Broad document for which I provided a link and you will see the outlines of Race to the Top. Note who participated. The Broad document appeared three months before Race to the Top, which means the ideas in it were under discussion well before April 2009. This commentary by a DC insider in a conservative think tank should help you see what happened. It was written two weeks after Race to the Top was announced.
Thanks Diane
I don’t understand the higher education rhetoric at all. It seems to look something like this: everyone should go to college, everyone should graduate in 4-6 years, and everyone should land a job commensurate with their degree immediately after graduation (except PhD grads, of whom there too many and who apparently deserve sub-par employment as underpaid adjuncts without job security and certainly not benefits). Also, college tuition should be cheaper both in terms of tuition and any kinds of federal and state support. And, students should learn more critical thinking skills, courses should be more rigorous, and yet it should be easier for students to graduate.
As someone who’s spent the past 11 years as a part-time adjunct at an institution with an open-enrollment policy, I’m frustrated with the conversation. My students all have full or part-time jobs. Most have families. There is a sizable portion that is not prepared for college-level work and who unfortunately tend not to make full use of the resources available to them even when those services are free (or as I point out to students on a regular basis: already paid for by your student fees so take advantage of it). We offer four year degrees, but we primarily serve non-traditional students and more traditional undergrads who can’t afford the sticker price of one of our more prestigious state institutions. Many of the latter stay at my institution for their general studies and then finish their degree at the (more expensive) state flagship university. There is a place for what we offer, but it’s certainly not valued by the current rhetoric.
In my opinion, the most frustrating part of the conversation is that it ignores two basic elements: college students are adults who are free to come and go as they please (unlike the majority of K-12 students), and colleges don’t “place” graduates in jobs. The reason many college grads can’t find a job in their area is the same reason many other people are struggling to find jobs: there aren’t as many jobs out there right now. Even in once-promising fields, things aren’t as promising. Colleges aren’t responsible for that. I remember many of my own colleagues working in degrees in technology, before the .com bust. They had a few good years before the bust at least, but one could hardly fault them for not getting a STEM degree and not following the market. The problem is that the market is changing so rapidly, and there’s such a focus on cutting wages in nearly any occupation these days that we can hardly expect most college students to pick a winning, market-proof career — and I’d argue that it’s an economic issue rather than an educational one.
Exactly. The highly educated Working Poor, 70% of faculty at US colleges and universities, are the ones who are charged with leading everyone else towards prosperity. The irony falls on deaf ears.
Obama stressed a livable wage for full time workers. What about the fact that colleges, and corporations like Walmart, have discovered they can save a lot more money by not hiring full timers –or even part timers? Contingent faculty are independent contractors where I teach, so we’re not even considered employees. We piece together several part time jobs, are not even paid minimum wage and qualify for benefits nowhere. Plus, colleges and corporations are cutting hours so they won’t have to pay into ObamaCare. No one really cares and, frankly, the hopelessness has become overwhelming.
It seemed as though the congress did not act warmly to the president’s education ideas. I think the resentment of the feds interfering on the state and local level may be catching on.
This is also interesting. I had a conversation with my father (a retired administrator, National Board Certified science teacher, and recipient of the presidential award for education) about this very phenomenon today.
He tends to support what we would call corporate education reform, but prides himself on being an independent thinker and supporting what is “best for the kids”. I think he means well but his years as an administrator sometimes seem to blind him to the very real concerns of RI educators who are caught up in this mess — though now that he is retired he seems to be distancing himself from some of it.
Anyway, his deflection of my concern about Federalization of education is that the Federal government essentially did the same thing with highway speed limits — effected state law changes by threatening to withhold money. The way he said it made it sound like that made RttT perfectly fine.
Read, “Yes, We Are Stupid in America!”
I too am an EC teacher; teaching UPK in a poverty community in Brooklyn. Mom from District 2, Dienne, and Cosmic Tinker, I listened to a short piece of his speech and just happened to hear his interest in early childhood and Pre-K. To be honest, I became very nervous. As it is now, the Common Core has, to me, unrealistic expectations of my students. I see more testing in the future and more profits for Pearson and all their pals. My daughter who teaches K in NYC and has a class of 25 ELLs says many of her children cry on a daily basis because of the work that is expected of them. Why are we rushing these young children? So that the testing companies can more even more profits. EC and pre-k is virgin territory. I am not hopeful.
Read the book, “Yes, We Are STUPID in America!” i believe you can relate to it.
I believe that “high quality preschool” will mean that “high quality” is determined by…
STANDARDIZED TESTS.
And “affordable preschool” is ridiculous. Make it free.
Because I also believe that when the text of the speech was published, just before the President spoke, the folks at Pearson were drooling in anticipation.
They can now get into the pre-K market full force because everyone knows that Pearson knows EVERYTHING about quality. They can create the tests and the curriculum. They can get David Coleman to expand the Common Core [NATIONAL] Standards down to pre-K. They already have data systems in place for the collection of even more data. They can actually open preschools across the country because – well, see everything else in this paragraph. Who wouldn’t want their kid in a pre-K that was founded on such an intimate relationship with the curriculum and the corresponding tests? (I WOULD NOT, but I’m a crazy teacher-rebel).
The market just exploded last night and Pearson is aligned to make more billions off the backs of 3 and 4 year olds.
High-quality preK IS critical to our students’ success. I’m a kindergarten teacher at a Title I public elementary school. Our mostly-ESL kinders come to us with nearly no school skills, no alphabet or number knowledge, no English, no social skill, etc. Pre-K would give them such a boost. But if the federal Department of Ed is designing that pre-K with the help of David Coleman and Pearson, it will be a mess.
Oh and don’t even get me started on “those German kids.” (Seriously, did he really say that? I mean I heard it and I still can’t wrap my head around that meme). German kids are tracked. I’m not saying this is a bad thing at all. But our government is telling us that ALL kids can and should go to college. That’s not what “those German kids” do.
I don’t believe for a minute that there will be any legislation introduced on pre-school funding… but if there IS it will be based on the Special Ed model whereby the feds PROMISE to pay 40% in five years, write a raft of regulations schools need to follow, never keep their promise to fund the program, and then cut funding to states who, not having enough money themselves, shift the costs to the local districts… This is why the most affluent districts have the “Cadillac” special ed programs and the least affluent districts continue to underserve special ed students. If Pre-K is mandated, Bronxville will be well served… the Bronx… not so much…
Obama’s discourse about science and math teachers is not serious talk about what inspires students to pursue biochem or engineering or chem degrees.He is talking about science-y degrees that will enable corporations to make profits at the expense of those with 2-year technical degrees. As far as math and science teachers getting “merit pay”? You do realize that most won’t teach because of the poor monetary compensation, so I don’t know who he thinks will actually teach! maybe TFA type people looking for the next ” big thing” before writing a dissertation. otherwise, why not be a nurse or PA or engineer or physical therapist? WHY would anyone teach in these horrific conditions?? One would make more money pursuing other jobs.
Your right. Teaching will become a job and not a career for Americans. Schools will create temporary jobs for political favorites. Also teaching positions will create more opportunities for visas as has been done in the medical fields. This recession has created a great opportunity to lower wages and thus lower tax income starting a viscous downward spiral.
When the president referred to preschool, I hope he wasn’t talking about Headstart. That seems to be nothing but a baby-sitting service. Research from the Feds themselves shows where the program does not produce lasting gains. And, he is going to pump more taxpayer money into a failing program?
Looking for perfection in a largely imperfect and failed system can only lead to depression. Educational policies cannot be neatly programmed to accomplish societal objectives unless there is a fundamental acceptance of the axiom that schooling is a necessary and beneficial function of any social organization, community or country.
Today at my school we were handed a 5 page back to back document that explained, somewhat, how we teachers are going to be evaluated. Every paragraph started with “All students.” Really? All students? I live in Las Vegas which continuously becomes more crime ridden as the recession looms on. And I am going to be graded by not how the majority of my students are doing, no all. That means 100 percent. Seriously, I’ve never seen any document that has to do with teaching and getting kids on track say 100 % of the kids in class have to pass. There is always some sort of break down of what is considered a passing score. But no, not for teachers we are going to be held accountable for all the students. Regardless of the fact that Johnny’s mom lost her insurance therefore he hasn’t had his meds in days, and can hardly stay in his seat let alone focussed on my teaching. What a joke. I plan to leave this profession, even though I love teaching! I’m done being walked on and treated like I’m too stupid to have a good job. Please excuse any mistakes my tablet sucks. I had to buy a knock off and not the real iPad because of my poor salary.