TIME Magazine has a cover story called “Rotten Apples,” in which it falsely asserts (on the cover) that “It’s Nearly Impossible to Fire a Bad Teacher. Some Tech Millionaires May Have Found a Way to Change That.” Here is a link to the cover and a petition denouncing this slander.
This TIME cover is as malicious as the Newsweek cover in 2010 that said, “We Must Fire Bad Teachers. We Must Fire Bad Teachers. We Must Bad Teachers,” and the TIME cover in 2008 showing a grim Michelle Rhee with a broom, prepared to sweep out “bad” teachers and principals. (As we now know, Rhee fired many educators, but saw no significant gains during her tenure in office.)
This non-stop teacher bashing, funded by millionaires and billionaires, by the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and even by the U.S. Department of Education, has become poisonous. Enrollments in teacher education programs are declining, sharply in some states. Experienced teachers are retiring early. Teaching has become so stressful, in this era of test mania, that our nation’s biggest teacher issue is recruiting and retaining teachers, not firing them.
Since when do tech millionaires know anything about teaching children? Why should they determine the lives and careers of educators? Why don’t they volunteer to teach for a week and then share their new wisdom?
Randi Weingarten is fighting back against TIME’s scurrilous cover. She is organizing a campaign to let TIME know that they have outraged and insulted America’s teachers. This bullying has to stop! Speak out! Tweet! Sign the petition! Write a letter to the editor! Organize a protest at TIME headquarters. Don’t let them get away with bullying teachers who earn less, work harder, and have greater social value than the writers at TIME or the tech millionaires.
Randi Weingarten writes:
From: Randi Weingarten
Date: Thu, Oct 23, 2014 at 5:36 PM
Subject: Teachers aren’t rotten apples
Time magazine is about to use its cover to blame teachers for every problem in America’s schools. On Monday, Nov. 3, this cover will be in every supermarket checkout line and newsstand across the country—and it’s already online.
When I saw this today, I felt sick. This Time cover isn’t trying to foster a serious dialogue about solutions our schools need—it’s intentionally creating controversy to sell more copies.
We’re running a petition demanding that Time apologize. Will you help us spread the word by using the tweets below to call on Time to apologize?
This midleading @Time cover hurts teachers and damages the mag’s own credibility. Ask them to apologize! #TIMEfail
Why is @Time attacking teachers? This misleading cover is more about sales than truth. Demand and apology! #TIMEfail
.@Time should do the right thing and ditch the planned anti-teacher cover! #TIMEfail
Once you’ve tweeted, please sign the petition telling Time’s editors to apologize for this outrageous attack on America’s teachers.
The millionaires and billionaires sponsoring these attacks on teacher tenure claim they want to get great teachers into the schools that serve high-need kids. It’s a noble goal, but stripping teachers of their protections won’t help.
In fact, this blame-and-shame approach only leads to low morale and high turnover, making it even harder to get great teachers into classrooms. Just today, constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky wrote a fact-based argument that tenure protections help recruit and retain high-quality teachers! In fact, there is a strong correlation between states with strong teacher tenure and high student performance.
And Time’s cover doesn’t even reflect its own reporting. The Time article itself looks at the wealthy sponsors of these efforts. And while it looks critically at tenure, it also questions the testing industry’s connections to Silicon Valley and the motives of these players.
But rather than use the cover to put the spotlight on the people using their wealth to change education policy, Time’s editors decided to sensationalize the topic and blame the educators who dedicate their lives to serving students. The cover is particularly disappointing because the articles inside the magazine present a much more balanced view of the issue. But for millions of Americans, all they’ll see is the cover, and a misleading attack on teachers.
There are serious challenges facing our schools—tell Time that blaming teachers won’t solve anything.
When we work together instead of pointing fingers, we know we can help students succeed.
In places like New Haven, Conn., Lawrence, Mass., Los Angeles’ ABC school district and many others, union-district collaboration is leading to real change2.
Instead of pitting students and teachers against each other, these districts are showing how we can build welcoming, engaging schools by working together to give kids the education they deserve. As a result of this collaborative approach, once-struggling schools all over America are turning around.
When we collaborate, we’re able to recruit AND retain high-quality teachers, and reclaim the promise of a high-quality education for every student.
And when we work together, we can also change tenure to make it what it was supposed to be—a fair shake before you are fired, not a job for life, an excuse for administrators not to manage or a cloak for incompetence.
But instead of a real debate, Time is using the cover to sensationalize the issue so it can sell magazines.
Tell Time magazine to apologize for blaming teachers in order to sell magazines.
We need to have a substantive, facts-based conversation about the challenges our schools face and the real solutions that will help educators and kids succeed.
Help us tell Time that blaming teachers isn’t the way to help struggling schools.
In unity,
Randi Weingarten
AFT President
1 “Teacher Tenure: Wrong Target”
2 “Four Solutions to Public School Problems”
If it’s any consolation, nobody reads Time Magazine anymore. For obvious reasons….
good point
Added link to AFT’s action and comments on cover to piece about the article. It’s such a bizarre cover choice because, as Randi says, the actual article is close to well-balanced. Hope some editor catches hell.
Peter
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 23:20:32 +0000 To: pagreene@outlook.com
Diane,
Since you are asking us to fight, I will. I received Randi’s email and I am a direct victim of her horrendous contract of 2005 for the NYC Teachers where she gave up Teachers seniority rights and created the ATR pool. So I assumed she helped co write the article and now wanted us to believe she had nothing to do with it.
I sure hope I am wrong on this matter.
I am sure you are not the only person with mixed feelings. I am not a union member and not up to teaching in the trenches but I am following the policies that the teacher unions, AFT and NEA, are supporting and endorsing, sometimes just by being silent.
The Massachusetts initiative for the CCSSO and USDE to take control of teacher education is a good example of too many go-along-to-get-along projects that will only increase the culture of compliance and standardize education in the manner of a McDonald’s University.
But the Time cover is outrageous. You can be sure some pollsters are working the turf to see how effective this propaganda piece is shifting public opinion toward more of the blame game paid for by foundations and corporations and a majority of republican governors and democrats in name only.
I hope some reporters who have the savvy to track down Obama and Duncan and persons running for office ask them for a public comment on that cover. I imagine the response to be something like its a free country, free speech issue– anything to avoid a positive statement about teachers, principals, public schools.
I envision a lot of opportunities for teachers who want to hit the advertisers in Time with some creative protests.
By the way, I did sign the petition and unleashed some angry comments.
Laura –
Mitchell Chester, MA Commissioner of Education is the president of PARCC. Because Massachusetts teachers are highly unionized and because we do well on national comparisons, I see these new proposals as an end run around collective bargaining.
We had “ed reform” before in 1993, which stripped teachers of their property rights of lifetime certification and made re-licensure a requirement every five years. Teachers are required to accumulate graduate or continuing ed credits (not reimbursed) and pay a fee for the license. Audits are (supposedly) done on a random basis.
The 1993 regs also required beginning teachers to complete a Masters’ degree at an accredited university within the first five years of their career. This to me is a particularly galling requirement, given the high cost of living, the high cost of graduate credit and the low salaries of new teachers – aside from the overwhelming circumstances of the classroom environment in those first years for new practitioners.
I understand that TNTP has its fingerprints all over the newly proposed requirements.
I wish somebody would figure out a way to fire a bunch o’ bad billionaires.
It’s hard to fire people who weren’t hired to begin with.
declare the dollar value-less. Start over.
??
The only thing people “without” can do is try to put value on things money cannot buy as best they can (in order to preserve sanity), and yet without putting heads in the sand.
I stopped reading Time years ago. It’s no better than People magazine.
Sent from my iPhone
>
Randi is complaining about a Time magazine article regarding teachers rights? What a joke. She is 100% responsible for the ERODING of teachers rights in NYC. As a poster mentioned above, she was the architect of the infamous 2005 NYC teacher contract that eliminated 30 years worth of teachers rights gained by real union leaders. She is not fooling me with her “fight” against Time magazine. At least with Time magazine they state their feeling right in the open. Randi on the other hand is the queen of backroom deals that actually hurt the teaching profession.
I’m feeling better about restarting my Newsweek print subscription. They are actually doing some good journalism there–maybe they’ll seize the opportunity to do some better reporting on the education sector. I had cancelled my Time subscription years ago because they had gone sensational and pop culture on cover after cover, forgetting their journalistic roots.
Sadly Newsweek is owned by a cult leader with right-wing inclinations. Now The Washington Post is owned by sociopath megalomaniac Jeff Bezos. PBS is compromised by its corporate sponsors. NPR is compromised by the Walton Family. It seems the Internet (Craigslist, HuffPost,…) “disrupted” journalism and the 1% have swooped in to take advantage.
I’m afraid public education is the next venerable American institution to be “disrupted” and turned to the advantage of the rich. Many journalists today write for free. Tomorrow, teachers may be able to teach for free (and try to cobble together an income by selling banner ads on their websites)!
As one blogger put it a couple years ago, “Teachers are the new Jews.” This article is analogous to something Josef Goebel’s propaganda ministry would put out against Jews to wipe out any sympathy the public might have for them, so as to grease the way to the Final Solution.
This isn’t L.A. Weekly, either… it’s TIME-freakin’-magazine.
If you were a college student considering teaching, and you saw this—and the rest of the anti-teacher propaganda spewed forth during the last ten years—would you want to go into teaching?
Stop the madness.
Why can’t we have a cover story on incompetent administrators, of which there are far too many in the NYC school system.
Agreed, and plenty in NJ as well!
Time Magazine’s circulation is declining.
It has a new policy that stack ranks writers.
One of the rating scores is on writing “content that is beneficial to advertisers.”
The longstanding principal of keeping editorial separate from ads is gone.
Experiments with direct advertising on the cover of Time are underway (also for Sports Illustrated). Given the cover pitch is: the “bad teacher problem” may be solved by “silicon valley,” I would not be surprised it the cover is not functioning as an ad paid for by a foundation or cluster of corporations eager to remain out of view but also eager to rush forward with tech-in-the-answer- for education– so just hand over your taxes for education and let us do the job.
The stack rating for Time writers, including the 2-20 point scale on “content beneficial to advertiser” was revealed in memos set to the newspaper writers union. Those documents included some of management’s ratings of Time writers… (Shades of the teacher ratings published in the LA newspapers for individual teachers.)
One of the commenters on the blog that exposed this policy noted that one writer who scored high on “content of benefit to advertisers” scored low on “quality of writing.”
So there you have what’s really happening at Time, thanks to this website and…. a member of a union.
http://gawker.com/time-inc-rates-writers-on-how-beneficial-they-are-to-1623253026
Laura, I was wondering if some “sponsor” paid for this cover, especially given the apparent mismatch between cover and story.
Could it be the, uh, “tech millionaires”?? 😉
I would not be surprised if this was the case.
We should reach out to Newsweek to counter with an article about the positive achievements in public education. We could all share narratives about positive classroom experiences that have nothing to do with CC or any reform initiatives.
If the oligarchs can privatize politics,
“With the advent of Citizens United, any players with the wherewithal, and there are surprisingly many of them, can start what are in essence their own political parties, built around pet causes or industries and backing politicians uniquely answerable to them. No longer do they have to buy into the system. Instead, they buy their own pieces of it outright, to use as they see fit. “Suddenly, we privatized politics,” says Trevor Potter, an election lawyer who helped draft the McCain-Feingold law.”
why should education be any different?
Milton Friedman’s disaster capitalism, or Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, in action!
Newsweek is not an option. It publishes reports of teacher education programs in a rating scheme approved by Bill Gates and based only of the checklists filled out by temps hired to collect and read college course syllabi.
“It’s Nearly Impossible to Fire a Bad
TeacherSuperintendent. Some Tech Millionaires May Have Found a Way to Change That.”There. Fixed.
Now the cover should be just fine.
Just got off the phone with a nice lady at TIME, who tried to persuade me to keep my subscription and not cancel it.
I got my first subscription to TIME when I was in 9th grade-a student subscription for social studies students. That was in 1973.
41 years of continuous subscription ended tonight.
Rock hound, good for you!
Awesome rock hound!!!!
TIME is desperate. Their magazines grow thinner and thinner. They’re always going for the sensational story to pump declining sales. They are becoming irrelevant except once a year when they name their man or woman of the year. Yawn.
Maybe people will be bored. It’s a replay of the 2010 anti-public school campaign.
Maybe they can’t roll this tired old theme out again.
I agree. We’ve been the whipping boy for so long now I sense a backlash against the bashers. Kicking a dog when she’s down doesn’t win many popularity contests.
The constant attacks on public schools and teachers in media are just weird. These people need therapy or something. It’s bizarre.
This has turned into some kind of wacky new genre; public school-bashing “journalism”
Enough already. Find another punching bag.
Just called Time to let them know I am not renewing the subscription for our high school library. Here’s hoping for the school library collective to respond in the same manner.
Great idea! There’s no sense in spending library funds for propaganda.
A lot of debate teams use Time for research, at least in my area. Also encourage them to drop the subscription.
Thank goodness no one under 40 reads this rag.
Randi has done more to hurt teachers than Time Magazine will ever do.
Randi is not the union. By not signing the petition, we distance ourselves from the union concept. As much as I dislike some of the things she has done, I still believe that the most effective way to be heard is to speak as an organization composed of thousands rather than as isolated individuals.
It would all depend 2old2teach on what policies the thousands are implementing. People are leaving my school in droves like rats escaping a sinking ship. Randi busies herself with Pearson transparency and Time Magazine campaigns while the teachers in the trenches are bleeding to death.
I know. I lost my job 3+ ago before we realized what was happening. My “handle” pretty much tells the rest of the story. I will always be a little bitter, but each one of us has to decide what action is most likely to lead to positive outcomes. It won’t affect my employment, but it might help someone else. Even though I will not teach again, I do hope that teaching will one day be a viable career choice again.
I know. I have read your story before. I am a teeny bit younger than you. Time magazine named Cami Anderson one of the hundred most influential people of the year a while back. Her hagiography was written by none other than Cory Booker. 72 teachers have been recently brought up on tenure charges in Newark. About half have resigned. Hundreds more are in the works for June. I personally do not care what Time magazine writes, or puts on its cover. It will change things not one iota for those suffering the humiliations of the corporate reformers. I am working outside of my certification with loads of children starved for attention. Some can barely answer the simplist of questions. The Common Core literacy materials are horrendous. This war on public education will not end well.
I talk about myself too often. Nowadays I try to keep it short and sweet and move on to the issues that are affecting teachers still teaching. It is criminal what is being done to career teachers who soon will be forgotten. Does anyone care how they will support themselves and their families?
It’s still the same old story
The fight for schools gets gory
A case of do or die
The world will always welcome teachers
As TIME goes bye
Can we get Streisand to sing it?
TIME to cancel.
Jeannie, exactly right.
CANCELLED HERE!
I HAVE NO TIME FOR TIME. . . . . .
What the heck? After all these years of widespread disparagement of teachers, this nonsense is getting old! It may sell magazines, but it’s not helping to improve education.
Btw, I can’t speak for other states, but I can assure you in TN it is NOT difficult to fire a good or bad teacher.
Massive teacher firings are scheduled for June in NJ.
Cross-posted at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/TIME-Magazine-Attacks-Amer-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Diane-Ravitch_Diane-Sawyer_Education_Fire-141023-42.html#comment517109
with this comment (which contains many links… if you wish to see them , go to the page and see my comment:
Of all the propaganda that is out there, the most insidious is the national narrative put forth byDuncan, who spreads the propaganda of the billionaire oligarchs. THEY MUST end public education so that they can convince an ignorant population that their versions of history, of science and of the Constitution are the truth. Democracy depends on shared knowledge!
Time Inc is in the pockets of these billionaires –they own all of the media, and this demonstrates how desperate they are to keep the voices of the authentic educators out of the media!
It is the same rant they have used to empty the schools of the professionals so that the schools would fail — and then, they could fix them with magic elixirs that enrich Pearson and charter schools, and ensure that public education is monetarized.
We educators know that what occurs in a classroom is not merely about teaching, but ALL ABOUT LEARNING. However, the propaganda machine of Koch/Broad/Gates/Walton/Murdoch and clones never stop!
And it works because facilitating learning, like healing and medicine is complex.
Worse, the people are already so divided… into 52 dates with 15,880 districts so that the reality of their dirty work is hidden. The do not have to divide and conquer… we are already sliced and diced and ready to be served.
So when the MEDIA DOES NOT COVER THE TRUTH, they can bamboozle the public!
The reality is that the Core Curriculawas written by Gates and non -educators. He produced and paid for that NPR programthat touts them! One does not have to speculate as to who is behind the Time propaganda.
They are wrong! This wrong approach to what it takes for kids to learn is the topic of conversation at the Ravitch blog where genuine teachers speak… and where the public never goes to learn what real educators know! Peter Greene nails it on his blog, Curamuducation.
And there are sites which chronicle the corruption, that really causes systems to fail.
While the propaganda about bad teachers is the only conversation Betsy Combier’s sites tell the real story, and Karen Horwitz tells of the corruptionThe NAPTA site gives the stories of the teachers THAT NO ONE KNOWS, and Anthony Cody, Leonie Haimison and Norm Scott tell the truth about what is needed for KIDS TO LEARN.
They threw out tens of thousands of EXPERIENCED VETERAN TEACHERS IN LAUSD. Go to the site, Perdaily which, in 2006 warned about the Vergara debacle before that judge undid the Constitution.
Austerity took out what was left of public education, and they are blaming the teachers? Smaller classes would make a huge difference, but now they ‘fixed’ the schools, and huge class sizes is common… while THEY BLAME THE TEACHERS?
…and if it is the money that is needed, then how about fixing the loopholes in the tax laws. : Read the data : “$7.6 trillion — 8 percent of the world’s personal financial wealth — is stashed in tax havens. If all of this illegally hidden money were properly recorded and taxed, global tax revenues would grow by more than $200 billion a year”
No money for education… The biggest lie out there next to those bad teachers!
TELL TIME MAGAZINE THEY ARE FULL OF EXCREMENT AND THAT YOU WILL LOOK AT ANYTHING THEY DO AS SUSPECT.
California has already declared a teacher shortage. The number of layoffs, combined with college students dropping their education degrees, have combined to disrupt their entire pipeline. California is a bellwether state, and this situation will spread throughout the rest of the country.
California is declaring a teacher shortage? That is news to me. I taught there a couple of years back and they were still laying off teachers left and right. The majority of teachers get “pink slipped” every year. Some districts go back 7 years on the seniority list during layoffs. Are you saying that that California is now finally out of the budget crisis from 2007? I would love to know.
Our budgets are about back to where they were in 2007, so no more furlow days at least. I think the “teacher shortage” is still more of a potential one, except in special ed. If Boomers actually decide they can retire, instead of staying in the classroom until they’re 100, we will have a teacher shortage because enrollment in Ed schools is way down. I wonder why?
What you point out, is what I say at Oped,news, all the time, that no one knows the truth… and the reason is that the rear 15,880 districts in 50 states and the liars can say anything they want because the public is clueless about what is happening in their own schools, let alone schools in the next district, the next state and across the nation.
They do not have to divide to conquer. They (Broad/Koch/ Walton/Gates/ Murdoch) own the media, and they own Duncan and have the propaganda tool of all time.
What do you mean when you say “California” has “declared a teacher shortage”? The state education department? The governor? And what does it mean to “declare” a teacher shortage?
It used to mean signing bonuses
Economists always associate shortage or surplus with a price. There may be an excess demand for teachers in California at the current salary, but at a much higher salary there might be an excess supply of people willing to teach.
Did Joe Klein write the cover headline? Sounds like his work.
For those canceling Time and wanting something to replace it with I highly recommend Progressive. They are fighting for teachers’ rights and public education in every issue.
Back2basic
We all know that if we play with fire, we will get burned regardless of how careful we are. Whoever plays game of smearing educators’ dignity and destroying the Public Education System, will suffer a twisted mind not only in this current life, but also in many upcoming reincarnated lives. Most of all, besides them, their children, grandchildren, and great grand children will suffer the same twisted mind. History has shown us the way in which people of all creeds have been living, enjoying, or suffering that is rooted in the past for thousands of years, regardless of whether or not the bad deeds are intentional or accidental.
Authorities with power and knowledge can fool all naive people all the time, some people sometimes, but cannot fool any conscientious people at any given time.
So, please, Dr. Weingarten (since I respect Dr. Ravitch, I politely call you Dr. as well), being as Union Leader, how do you show your integrity and care for all union members who place their trust in your mind, heart and hand? If you are afraid of being framed or exposed for whatever is in your past, please step aside and recommend other members, or resign in order to let AFT (America Federation of Teachers) show its true colors in fighting back for all teachers’ missions in maintaining and creating many best generations of civilized and exemplary citizens for American society.
Being a Union Leader, you can create a union magazine where many retirees can be the best sources to inform, educate, and cultivate all young educators, parents, and students regarding the utmost important GOAL in Public Education. Most of all, you and all writers can groom the new union leader; you can unite or connect other state unions; and you also can expose any bad deeds from DOE, district/state superintendents, governors and any bad publishers.
I sincerely wish that all educators will unite in one strong force regardless of different states in order to indeed educate all greedy/savage employers to pay attention to America’s future = children’s joy of learning, playing, arts, sports and music. Back2basic
Waste of time. How about real action such as a one day strike?
For every thing burn burn burn
There is a magazine burn burn burn
And a Time for every bonfire under Heaven
PS: it works well for woodstoves too
What is a TIME? And what are these things called “magazines”?
For starters… the NEA should take TIME Magazine off their special rate for teachers magazine list! What a disgrace and so disheartening to know that TIME did this.
I’m sorry, but there is some truth to the difficulty of removing an ineffective teacher from a building. Last year, I evaluated a completely ineffective teacher. Her lack of supervision resulted in a child setting the classroom on fire and the teacher failed to pull the fire alarm. When we met with HR and presented all the documentation that we had to justifiably not renew the teacher’s contract (including 3 years of improvement plans), HR agreed and sent it on to the superintendent. Imagine our shock and surprise when the district decided to not pursue the non-renewal for fear of a law suit. I’m all for coaching and helping teachers to improve, that’s why I moved into administration. However, when the teacher doesn’t use the coaching and resources to improve, we need to be able to more easily move them on.
Who is threatening this lawsuit? I cannot believe it is the union. The teacher has enough money? In one district for which I worked, they were scared to death of lawsuits from parents with more money than sense. The district would sacrifice a teacher without hesitation if a parent with clout threatened legal action.
Then your superintendent is a coward. Or perhaps the superintendent is lazy and needs coaching. Any school system that terminates a teacher with evidence of just cause has nothing to worry about when it comes to a terminated teacher financing a lawsuit with the teacher’s salary that he/she is no longer making. Of course if the teacher is fired for an illegal reason (such as Title VII), that’s another issue. Even then, school systems have so much more power than a single teacher who can be easily outmaneuvered in the legal process.
This obviously depends a lot on the process in place in a given district. In New York City, which has 80,000 or so active classroom teachers, 23 teachers were fired for poor performance in the 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 school years, total. The drain on resources makes the cost-benefit analysis on pursuing a termination a tough decision for even the most competent and fair-minded administrators.
Again, I want to know the total number of teachers who left, not just those who needed encouragement. Isn’t it a good thing that only 23 had to be forced out?
No excuses Tim.
The aim is t destroy public school education and replace it with publicly funded private schools. To reach this end, public school teachers must be eliminated. Elimination of public school teachers can easily occur if ‘tenure’ is eliminated: destroy teachers collective bargaining due process rights and then there is no mechanism to fight teacher firings. Eliminate teachers by rating them as low proficient ( or whatever term is used) via invalid VAM evaluation tools.
We have seen this coming. We have not been blind sided. Federal and state governments, foundations and the oligarchy are in confederacy against public school teachers. Control of the unions, the one protector of teachers rights, is in the hands of leaders who continue to want a “seat at the table” with the very people who would destroy their constituencies.
Teachers must take matters into their own hands and fight to retain their rights. They must make alliances with their natural allies in their communities. The Time magazine article makes demonstrates that there is no time to waste.
The aim is larger than that. Attacks on workers and the intellectual class are signs of fascism. It is important to read political scientist Sheldon Wolen’s book Democracy Incorporated. In it he argues that we are not a democracy at all, we simply have democratic- appearing structures like elections, a Bill of Rights etc but in fact, the corporate class controls all of it. He terms this Inverted Totalitarianism and he argues that the United States is in fact already in this stage. See Chris Hedges recent article at Truth Dig for a full explanation for why this form of dictatorship is hard to identify and fight.
Barbara, here’s the 3 parts of an 8 part series of interviews with Wolen by Chris Hedges on The Real News Network.
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12550
From Randi’s letter: “The cover is particularly disappointing because the articles inside the magazine present a much more balanced view of the issue.”
It is a shame Time chose to support a false narrative about teachers with their cover. Even if the interior articles present a more balanced picture, I will not go out of my way to read what they have to say especially if I have to pay for it..
This is disgusting. Shame on Time!
Laura H. Chapman: a marvelously revealing bit of info re stacking writing of writers at TIME! And about the erasure of the line between advertisers and article content…
Thank you!
Stacking ranking, hmmmmm…
Didn’t they try that at Microsoft, the claim to fame of Bill Gates, the de facto Secretary of Education of these United States of America? And isn’t he trying to impose it on teachers and students in public schools?
I wonder how it worked out in Microsoft…
[start quote]
By 2002 the by-product of bureaucracy—brutal corporate politics—had reared its head at Microsoft. And, current and former executives said, each year the intensity and destructiveness of the game playing grew worse as employees struggled to beat out their co-workers for promotions, bonuses, or just survival.
Microsoft’s managers, intentionally or not, pumped up the volume on the viciousness. What emerged—when combined with the bitterness about financial disparities among employees, the slow pace of development, and the power of the Windows and Office divisions to kill innovation—was a toxic stew of internal antagonism and warfare.
“If you don’t play the politics, it’s management by character assassination,” said Turkel.
At the center of the cultural problems was a management system called “stack ranking.” Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. The system—also referred to as “the performance model,” “the bell curve,” or just “the employee review”—has, with certain variations over the years, worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor.
“If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, two people were going to get a great review, seven were going to get mediocre reviews, and one was going to get a terrible review,” said a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
Supposing Microsoft had managed to hire technology’s top players into a single unit before they made their names elsewhere—Steve Jobs of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Larry Page of Google, Larry Ellison of Oracle, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon—regardless of performance, under one of the iterations of stack ranking, two of them would have to be rated as below average, with one deemed disastrous.
For that reason, executives said, a lot of Microsoft superstars did everything they could to avoid working alongside other top-notch developers, out of fear that they would be hurt in the rankings. And the reviews had real-world consequences: those at the top received bonuses and promotions; those at the bottom usually received no cash or were shown the door.
Outcomes from the process were never predictable. Employees in certain divisions were given what were known as M.B.O.’s—management business objectives—which were essentially the expectations for what they would accomplish in a particular year. But even achieving every M.B.O. was no guarantee of receiving a high ranking, since some other employee could exceed the assigned performance. As a result, Microsoft employees not only tried to do a good job but also worked hard to make sure their colleagues did not.
“The behavior this engenders, people do everything they can to stay out of the bottom bucket,” one Microsoft engineer said. “People responsible for features will openly sabotage other people’s efforts. One of the most valuable things I learned was to give the appearance of being courteous while withholding just enough information from colleagues to ensure they didn’t get ahead of me on the rankings.”
Worse, because the reviews came every six months, employees and their supervisors—who were also ranked—focused on their short-term performance, rather than on longer efforts to innovate.
“The six-month reviews forced a lot of bad decision-making,” one software designer said. “People planned their days and their years around the review, rather than around products. You really had to focus on the six-month performance, rather than on doing what was right for the company.”
There was some room for bending the numbers a bit. Each team would be within a larger Microsoft group. The supervisors of the teams could have slightly more of their employees in the higher ranks so long as the full group met the required percentages. So, every six months, all of the supervisors in a single group met for a few days of horse trading.
On the first day, the supervisors—as many as 30—gather in a single conference room. Blinds are drawn; doors are closed. A grid containing possible rankings is put up—sometimes on a whiteboard, sometimes on a poster board tacked to the wall—and everyone breaks out Post-it notes. Names of team members are scribbled on the notes, then each manager takes a turn placing the slips of paper into the grid boxes. Usually, though, the numbers don’t work on the first go-round. That’s when the haggling begins.
“There are some pretty impassioned debates and the Post-it notes end up being shuffled around for days so that we can meet the bell curve,” said one Microsoft manager who has participated in a number of the sessions. “It doesn’t always work out well. I myself have had to give rankings to people that they didn’t deserve because of this forced curve.”
The best way to guarantee a higher ranking, executives said, is to keep in mind the realities of those behind-the-scenes debates—every employee has to impress not only his or her boss but bosses from other teams as well. And that means schmoozing and brown-nosing as many supervisors as possible.
“I was told in almost every review that the political game was always important for my career development,” said Brian Cody, a former Microsoft engineer. “It was always much more on ‘Let’s work on the political game’ than on improving my actual performance.”
Like other employees I interviewed, Cody said that the reality of the corporate culture slowed everything down. “It got to the point where I was second-guessing everything I was doing,” he said. “Whenever I had a question for some other team, instead of going to the developer who had the answer, I would first touch base with that developer’s manager, so that he knew what I was working on. That was the only way to be visible to other managers, which you needed for the review.”
I asked Cody whether his review was ever based on the quality of his work. He paused for a very long time. “It was always much less about how I could become a better engineer and much more about my need to improve my visibility among other managers.”
In the end, the stack-ranking system crippled the ability to innovate at Microsoft, executives said. “I wanted to build a team of people who would work together and whose only focus would be on making great software,” said Bill Hill, the former manager. “But you can’t do that at Microsoft.”
[end quote]
Link: http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer#
I profusely apologize for the length of the excerpt but try this mental exercise for a moment: imagine the above was about what VAM and high-stakes standardized tests and CCSS have done and are doing to public schools, how they cripple and destroy genuine learning and teaching.
The horror of it all is that the current situation all too closely resembles what is described above—that is, what’s already happened should serve as a cautionary tale about WHAT NOT TO DO.
And instead the self-proclaimed leaders of the “education reform” movement just double down on their proven past failures.
Just sayin’…
😎
The best revenge is cancelling subscriptions.
Yes.
Unbelievable.
Again, though: the purpose of schooling has been hijacked. The only way for them (the hijackers) to move forward is to mock and taunt.
Shame on them.
Accuracy isn’t even a consideration with this TIME cover. Its sole purpose is propaganda. Propaganda in its purest sense paid for by Time’s advertisers/owners/political elites. The purpose of this attack is to shape the public narrative and justify future attacks on teacher tenure. These attacks will translate into policy. You cannot convince me that Randy didn’t see something like this coming.
Teachers are now on the defensive rather than being on the offensive. It’s a bad place to be in the propaganda wars. AFT & NEA are too far behind to make a meaningful difference. It’s going to take more than begging for an apology to recover.
Mark NaisonChildren are more than test scores
2 hrs · Edited ·
A Reality Check for Time Magazine- And A Wake Up Call for the Nation’s Teachers Mark has a good respond….. Children Are More Than Test Scores
find his article there….. FB
Joanne Best describes the “mock and taunt” and we are seeing that in ads for the senate in NH where they dress up a child in a spelling bee and have her spell Jeanne Shaheen’s name as Obama. Mocking and taunting is a form of bullying and it doesn’t elucidate the conversation or discussion or bring any light to the issues; then they use a sensationalized cover on Time with an apple that further teaches our students to disrespect the profession (as they disrespect their parents, their priests or clergy-persons, police) etc . it is destructive to the profession as well as to society. Someone called it a “cultural revolution”? it is the break down of civic responsibility and civic virtue but I don’t blame the teachers for all of that…. Turning our students against us… would that work in the hospitals? should we try it? is it anarchy? is it nihilism? I now when the crazy man flew his plane into the public building in Austin TX (where my sister lives) Scott Brown , the newly elected tea party senator in MASS said “those are the angry people who voted for me”……..
I understand being offended but all the polling I’ve seen indicates teachers are much more trusted than any of the people launching these attacks: media people, lobbyists, politicians. Is there anything lower than a lobbyist right now? People hate them.
The trust in teachers seems to be pretty resilient in this country. It’s survived the last decade of these crazy attacks. Maybe it’s because so many people know a
teacher personally, maybe it’s because people like their local public school a lot more than national media and politicians like local public schools, but these efforts to discredit and smear the whole profession don’t seem to be sticking.
For my part, as a citizen and not a teacher, I’m ashamed the Obama Administration endorsed the CA trial court decision and these lawsuits. It’s embarrassing. They’ve made it impossible to consider them an honest broker in any of these debates. They are so CLEARLY captured by the ed reform lobby, so clearly only interested in one narrow view. I think they’re so far in the ed reform bubble they don’t see the bias themselves. What was the possible upside of endorsing the lawsuit, other than to curry favor with this particular lobby? They should have stayed neutral. They’ve disqualified themselves as credible on any of this.
Except that people tend to trust the teachers they know, but still think that there are lots of “bad teachers.” That’s the problem–that indefinable “other.” That lack of respect is trickling down to the teachers people know. In my experience, parents believe rumors and innuendos before believing the actual teachers anymore. The poison is slowly killing that trust.
This article is a flagrant example of rank corporate/government propaganda masquerading as objective journalism. The goal is to placate and quell mass opposition to the government sanctioned attacks on the teaching profession.
I loved my career as a teacher and hope that it wasn’t the golden age of teaching. With the breakthroughs in the science of teaching, especially for special needs, students, I was looking forward to the future. This isn’t true any more. I wish I could time travel to see what history is going to say about all of this.
Well, I don’t know if it’s worth anything, but I don’t buy it and I’m not a teacher or a union member.
It seems to me to be really convenient for powerful people to blame everything in the world on this one group of middle class working people. It reads like transparent BS to me, an obvious dodging of responsibility and accountability by wealthy people and the lawmakers they bought. There’s huge inequality in this country and they have settled on public schools and teachers as the cause of that. That’s very nice for them, but I’m not buying it.
Politicians should spend more time worrying about their own performance and less time delivering stern, scolding lectures to working people. They’re not real popular with their constituents. There’s a reason for that.
Every teacher with a subscription to time for kids should cancel it TODAY!
Is Campbell Brown behind this?
I’m sure Brown & her insiders are behind it. Washington is a veal pen (Jane Hamsher refers to their incestuous relationships) where they all talk to each other and decide what teachers should be saying to support the current corporate policy du jour.
Teachers started getting out of line so the veal pen needs to kick them back into submission.
How about forcing the Obama Administration to weigh in again? They came down hard on the anti-tenure side and endorsed a trial court decision with the full weight of the federal government. That was completely inappropriate and probably unethical, but it’s really par for the course in Duncan’s agency. They took sides a long time ago and they’re anti-labor and anti-public schools and he’s a petty political operator. He shouldn’t be allowed to weasel out now that the anti-tenure people are (predictably) over-playing their hand.
Do they also endorse these tactics? This anti-tenure political campaign? Is there anything the giant ed reform lobby does that Duncan and Obama will break with, or is it complete capture?
Exactly. Force them to admit they are no better than Jeb Bush. Teachers need to join forces with the http://boldprogressives.org/ PCCC- these progressives know how to kick butt and take on both parties in targeted primaries.
Duncan’s former employees deliver another stern lecture to the public. Today’s patronizing lesson is on civility!
“Stop criticizing my former boss and my friends!”
http://educationpost.org/setting-better-example-bullying-prevention/#.VEo3bcmrPIU
Is TIME Inc. developing materials for Common Core,nation-wide distribution for history, social studies etc? Just wonder if there’s a marketing agenda behind this attack. TIME needs readers so it seems like they would support teachers, who are the bedrock of our educational system.
So why is it that we still have “bad” politicians, lawyers, CEO’s. Having lots of money doesn’t make one “good” We can’t seem to get rid of those either.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
I’m moving over Mark Naison’s comments at:
http://withabrooklynaccent.blogspot.com/2014/10/a-reality-check-for-time-magazine-and.html
————————–
“Friday, October 24, 2014
“A Reality Check for Time Magazine –
And A Wake Up Call for America’s Teachers
MARK NAISON:
“Nearly two years ago, a group of 1,500 principals, including many of the most highly respected school administrators in the the state, signed and circulated a petition to the Governor of New York protesting policies which were undermining public education and making their jobs more difficult. If you would believe Time Magazine, you would think they were protesting teachers’ tenure. But their petition NEVER MENTIONED tenure. It protested high stakes testing and teacher evaluations based on student test scores.
“That petition never made the national news, much less the cover of Time magazine. But now Time chooses to give huge attention to a campaign by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur to eliminate teacher tenure in the nation’s public schools.
“What is going on here? Why is a campaign against High Stakes Testing by respected educators not worthy of coverage while a campaign by a billionaire against tenure from someone who has no experience teaching or administering a public school becomes the lead story of the week?
“Time’s campaign epitomizes everything wrong with the crusade for “School Reform” that has become a national obsession since the passage of No Child Left Behind.
“It is financed and driven by business leaders, not educators. It has no support from teachers and school administrators and systematically ignores their voices. It chooses to totally disregard the best education research when it fails to support the application of a business model to classroom teaching and educational administration.
“Demonizing teachers, and anointing CEO’s and billionaires as saviors of public education, the way Time Magazine does, is not only a sure path to weakening public education, it creates momentum for a campaign to privatize public education a policy from which those attacking public education, especially those in the tech industry, are likely to profit.
“The only way to fight back against this is to punish those leading the charge. It is time for a principal and teacher boycott of Time Magazine, and Time for Kids.
“The sleeping giant has woken up. And she will NOT go to sleep until the national assault on teachers has come to an end.”
“Time Cover Up”
Rotten Apples in the schools
Bullying from pompous fools
“Doctors” sans a PhD
Teachers fired with VAMmy glee
Charters making off with loot
Starters in their orange suits
Rubbish “science” in the courts
Chetty picks and VAM reports
Loads of fraud and nutty claims
Incompetence and scamming games
Funded by the billionaires
Minus clues and minus cares
Privatization of public goods
Selling out the neighborhoods
Weeks of tests with no result
Except to make the teachers bolt
Kids abused and traumatized
By fake reforms and outright lies
Details that are very gory
Time to do a different story
And blast them with comments at:
https://www.facebook.com/time
“Since when do tech millionaires know anything about teaching children? ”
The answer to this question is ridiculously simple. In America, the land of capitalism, money = success and success means you must be smart. Why else would Bill Gates who dropped out of college be considered the smartest man in the world?
BTW Glenn Beck is worth 105 million. That confirms the theory? Wake up America. Perhaps our inability to see through these charlatans is the best evidence yet that our education is failing.
I too have found that the student teachers have stopped. At one time I had at least one a placed in my classroom every year. I am getting zero now. In fact our school is large and there isn’t one. That only helps the privatization agenda. Be careful what you wish for America, there will be time machine to take us back.
“When you’re rich, they think you really know…” Tevye
Before the Rwandan genocide, the Rwandan media was filled with calls to “cut down the tall trees” (the Tutsis) and “clear out the brush” (the Hutus who were married to or otherwise supported Tutsis). This is more of the same.
Interesting, btw, that our dear friends Joe Nathan and Teaching Economist aren’t here expressing any disturbance at this kind of treatment of teachers.
I’m infuriated. I want to declare my allegiance to heros who have dedicated their lives to America’s public schools. My list includes Mrs. Zablocki, my 1st grade teacher in St. Petersburg, Florida; Mrs. Gerstner, my 3rd grade teacher in Ledyard, Connecticut; Mrs. Broadmoor, my 4th grade teacher in Staten Island, New York; and Mrs. Hill, my 7th grade English teacher in Savannah, Georgia. You see, my father was in the Coast Guard and we moved around quite a bit — so I experienced public school education in a number of states. My list also includes those on the front lines of efforts to reclaim the democratic institution of public schools like Diane Ravitch, Susan Ohanian, Mercedes Schneider, Peter Green, Anthony Cody, and so many others. My list also includes the millions of moms and dads who have supported their public schools over the years, the children served by public schools across our country, the teachers who are in the business of transforming the lives of their students, and the administrators and school board members who work diligently to meet the needs of the communities they serve.
TIME Magazine’s cover story, “Rotten Apples: It’s Nearly Impossible to Fire a Bad Teacher. Some Tech Millionaires May Have Found a Way to Change That,” obviously panders to the One Percenters who position themselves as being the standard bearers of the free market that has rewarded them so richly and has allowed hedge fund managers to set the economic agenda for the rest of the country. This, however, is not a new phenomenon. Corporate superstars have been inserting themselves in federal education policy for decades. And leading the charge has been those involved in the tech industry. David Kearns, credited with saving Xerox in the 1980s, brought his corporate reform ideas to the education arena and the federal Department of Education during the H. W. Bush administration. Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM, likewise became a powerful voice in education reform in the 1990s, hosting the 1996 Palisades Summit at the IBM headquarters, a meeting that brought governors (who he referred to as the CEOs of their states) together with prominent corporate CEOs to decide the fate of public schools in the U.S. This was the meeting that birthed Achieve, a free market reform agenda, and the CCSS. It was at this meeting that President Bill Clinton introduced the education policy world to Bill Gates, then embroiled in investigations into his dubious, monopolistic practices at Microsoft.
Teacher hate and a disdain for public schools is not new to the tech millionaires. In 1995, speaking at the National Governors Association, Lou Gerstner ironically began his speech by stating, “I’m here because of Willie Sutton. Willie robbed banks, the story goes, because he realized that’s where the money is. I’m here because this is where the power is — the power to reform — no, to revolutionize — the U.S. public school system.”* Almost two decades later, I think it’s safe to say that Gerstner’s first assertion has turned out to be more accurate. The corporate world was there at the table of education reform policy because, indeed, that’s where the money is. In 2008, Gerstner would reveal the corporate agenda for education reform, calling for “The abolishment of all local school districts except for 70 — one for each of the 50 states and one for each of the major cities and the establishment of a set of national standards for a core curriculum.”
There has been no secret conspiracy to privatize the American public school system. Corporate reformers have been quite bold in establishing their agenda. As I write in my upcoming book, The Origins of the Common Core: How the Free Market Became Public Education Policy, “The steady drumbeat of corporate encroachment into the education arena was there the entire time. However, its cadence was so steady and natural that, like cicadas at sunset, the noise went almost unnoticed by too many Americans. The idea that the nation’s public school system was a failure had become an unquestioned zeitgeist by a burgeoning number of critics who jumped on board the anti-public school bandwagon. Those on the political right and the political left seized every opportunity to point to the need to systemically reform public education.”*
“There is a price on the head of every child in America. As the free market theories of Milton Friedman became the driving force behind public policy in the United States, beginning with the Reagan administration, public schools would inevitably become ensnared in the dragnet of entrepreneurs who envisioned public education as a burgeoning market.”*
The issue of teacher tenure is just the latest focus of corporate reformers intent on destroying public schools in America. Is teacher tenure protection really the problem? I began my education career as a public school teacher in Mississippi. There is no tenure protection in Mississippi and no real union presence to advocate for teachers. Mississippi, therefore, should be the exemplar for the power of eliminating tenure protection and allowing teachers to be fired more easily as a way to improve education and student achievement. The reality is, however, that Mississippi students have and continue to rank much lower on measures of student achievement than other students across the country. Apparently, teacher tenure laws are not the largest barrier to student achievement. Research has demonstrated time and again that poverty and other social factors contribute greatly to student achievement. So, it is no wonder that Mississippi, with some of the highest rates of poverty in the country, lags behind the rest of the country in rankings of student achievement.
Clearly when it comes to corporate led education reform, “America’s public school system has once again become a scapegoat for all that ails American society, while heralding all the ramifications of free market systemic education reform as the means of saving the United States from its supposed enemy – the public school system writ large.”* However, as the last short paragraph of my book proclaims, “For American citizens, if there is one thing to remember about public schools it is this: Public schools are not government schools, nor are they corporate free market schools. Public schools belong to the public. Public schools are citizen schools, and it is now up to citizens to reclaim what is theirs!”*
* Quoted texts are excerpted from my upcoming book The Origins of the Common Core: How the Free Market Became Public Education Policy (Palgrave Macmillan, January, 2015).
Respectfully,
Deb Owens
http://publicschoolscentral.com/
I put the hashtag on Twitter yesterday for their microagression(or assault?) on teachers. #SHAMEONYOUTIME.
“Missive-aggressive”
Missive-aggressive
Such is Time
Mythive-injestive
For a dime
Diane, here is what I wrote to Time after seeing the cover:
Time Magazine should be ashamed of this “Rotten Apples” cover. However “balanced” your article inside may or may not be, your cover is insulting to all teachers, to the families of all teachers, and to the communities they have served. Time’s cover patently contributes to the demonization of the hardest working and least self-serving members of our education system. Your cover is also false: Tenure does not make it almost impossible to fire bad teachers, but rather that all teachers get due process.
I don’t know which “tech millionaires” your article will refer to, and how they are going to “help.” I hope your article will point out that the unwise solutions championed by some tech billionaires are contributing to the closing of community public schools, and to the privatization of public education. Regardless of your position, your cover contributes to the demonization of teachers, and you should apologize.
Reblogged this on and commented:
This news nauseates. The ongoing attack on the education profession has reached more than troubling proportions. MBA’s and CEO’s are leading the charge with a business model that does not benefit children at all. Wake up folks.
Have people signed the AFT petition?
Her is another petition I just signed and I emailed a copy to the Boston Globe, to Fitchburg Sentinel newspaper etc.
quoting petition: “Media does matter in a democracy. In order for a society run by we the people to function fairly and effectively, we must have accurate, meaningful information on which to base important public policy decisions.
Yet our mass media routinely fails us in this regard. Media outlets often prioritize sensational, irrelevant and even false information over the factual information and analysis we need in order to be informed voters, consumers, and community members.
Furthermore, media outlets often distort our perceptions of the important issues they do cover by making bad decisions about who gets to speak on those issues. Who gets ink and airtime determines what issues we pay attention to and which actions we take. So when the wrong people are given that ink and that airtime, the general public ends up paying attention to the wrong issues, and taking the wrong actions.
This has been a problem for economic policy, environmental policy, and myriad others. And sadly, public education is no different. Education doesn’t get nearly the media attention it truly deserves, but when it is covered, it’s often the people with the least knowledge and experience of public schools, and those who are least representative of the groups most affected by education policy, who are doing most of the talking.
Students’ lives are shaped by the educational experiences they have on a daily basis, yet they’re rarely taken seriously– or even allowed to represent themselves– in education policy discussions. And though the majority of public school students are now people of color, the overwhelming majority of people given the opportunity to address the public on educational issues are white.
Working- and middle-class communities depend on public schools both as sites of education as well as sites of employment and economic opportunity. Yet as we just saw with TIME magazine, many mass media outlets focus on the opinions of wealthy people who don’t attend, work in, or send their children to public schools to shape the discussion about public education issues.
And while the teaching profession is nearly 80% women, media outlets frequently give men from totally unrelated, majority-male domains like the tech and finance industries space to advance their ideas on education policy, no matter how misinformed or even dangerous their ideas are.
So while the same few people on both “sides” of the education debate go back and forth on the same tired issues, much bigger educational questions are going completely unasked, let alone answered. How can we change funding structures and tax policies to ensure that all students get the resources they need? How can we make sure that the teaching profession reflects the student population it serves, and finally ensure that all teachers are culturally competent enough to respectfully and effectively teach students of different races, genders, orientations and social classes? How can we make sure our schools strengthen our democracy, and contribute to a more just and sustainable world?
These are just a sampling of the kinds of big questions the public won’t get to consider so long as misinformation about issues like due process remains the primary focus of mainstream education coverage. As TIME deals with the backlash against their offensive cover, let’s take this opportunity to insist on a better public conversation about education.
Please join us in asking the editors of five of America’s most influential and widely-read magazines to devote at least one issue to giving us—members of diverse public school communities—time to discuss some of these bigger questions.
Sign on to send a message to the editors of the following magazines:
The Atlantic
The New Yorker
Ebony
Readers’ Digest
Parents Magazine END QUOTE:
some of us wrote to Highlights earlier this fall when they showed a full face of Arne Duncan as “educational hero”…. don’t know what response you will get but it is worth trying
While I understand and support the idea of more teachers reflecting the student population they serve, I find it more important that “all teachers are culturally competent enough to respectfully and effectively teach students of different races, genders, orientations and social classes.” In the end, we are all best prepared to serve our own communities, but if we are to promote a diverse society that respects all members we had better “mix it up.” We need to create comfort across races, genders, orientations and social classes.
2Old2teach: I think they are remarking on things such as this: Boston Public Schools is about 80% minority and you can only find about 6 or 8 male teachers of minority populations… I might have the statistics just a bit off here but it is a substantial difference and I think that is what they might be referring to . As you have said, I think that it is also helpful to have diversity ; like 50 to 100 or more different languages spoken in some of our inner city schools among the communities of Greater Boston and it is quite a good neighborhood mix in the sense that people live closer to gether; where I am it is one big city as if you are on the NJ turnpike and you look over to the side and we are the interstate commerce highway for everything north of us heading n/s etc. This wouldn’t necessarily be true in all rural areas though.
And in the situation you describe, there is no doubt that more minority teachers, particularly male are needed although I doubt they even exist. Finding male teachers, especially teachers who want to work at the elementary level, is difficult. In Chicago, we seem to be wiping out African American women teachers by closing neighborhood schools and creating charters. You know those charters are not hiring all those experienced teachers even if they can swallow the significantly lower salaries.
2old2teach You and I have similar ideas and we have shared them in the past…. I am dismayed also that teachers that I know who are effective in the classroom are having difficulty with the licensure tests. We have one woman who speaks 3 languages and has shown to be effective in classrooms and she missed the licensure test by 1 or 2 points …. this is the state department denying a license and it is the “stupid” test that is in error here. But try to tell that to the bureaucrats; my colleague has 4 or 5 licenses and she has to renew them all and that means service fees to the state. This is even harder on the minority teachers and those who aspire to be teachers.
jeanhaverhill@aol.com
“You and I have similar ideas and we have shared them in the past….”
I have a feeling we could spend several hours trading anecdotes.
to go to Sabrina’s petition :
link: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/ask-times-competitors-lets-talk-about-real-education-issues?source=direct_link&;
Thanks!
Sabrina Stevens
There are many good teachers, but there are definitely bad teachers, too. The blind allegiance in these posts amazes me. Anyone who teaches knows who the bad teachers are. My child had one last year. Their teacher this year has apologized for that teacher. My spouse was amazed that the new teacher would apologize. “Teachers don’t bash other teachers” was her quote. Even if they’re terrible. Time to wake up people. By weeding out the bad ones your credibility will increase, goodwill towards teachers will increase, and the kids win in the end.
This is false. No “good” teacher wants to have an incompetent colleague – if out of nothing more than selfishness. A weak colleague is a headache: if one precedes you in the curriculum, you have to work twice as hard to catch those kids up; if one succeeds you, all your hard work can be undone; if one teaches in an adjoining classroom, your own is interrupted so that you can derail problems or intervene for peace.
Teachers don’t weed out poor teachers, nor do we hire them. That is the job of administrators.
That is exactly the point. You don’t weed them out, or hire them, but the teachers’ unions protect them, nonetheless. The good teachers don’t want them, but they like the security that goes with tenure, so they endure them.
Also, the story is not false. It is a true story.
ALERT: I used the “T” word! Will I get a horse’s head in my bed tonight? (Or the teachers’ union equivalent?)
Finally, does anyone believe in excelling in their profession anymore? Perhaps if tenure wasn’t there the elite teachers would be treated as elite teachers and not the same as average teachers? The unions hold good teachers down just as much as they protect the bad ones.
Teachersspouse, I admit I’m confused by your comments. The contract that the district entered into with the teachers union details how to remove a poor teacher. This contract was entered into by both sides. If the process takes too long consider the district who may have failed to gather adequate documentation to remove that teacher. Administrators who cannot or will not compile the data they need to dismiss a teacher is not the fault of the union. Unions don’t hire teachers, they don’t evaluate them, they represent them as they are expected and required to do.
The union accepts money from that teacher, so that union is ethically, morally, and legally obligated to “defend” that teacher. The union represents the interests of its members, even when they know that teacher should be doing something else.
Since tenure simply ensures due process, the hearing that must occur in the dismissal process will work, assuming both sides do their job. Doing things right takes time.
Amen!
Hi Michelle.
Teacherspouse
You can’t possibly be this clueless. You really think that teachers should somehow be policing their own profession? This is a really, really STUPID-BAD idea.
Sometimes I think folks believe that teachers unions are like those in “On the Waterfront”. Waiting for Jimmy Hoffa to turn up!
NY Teacher,
Tenured faculty at post sechondary institutions police thier own. It isn’t perfect but it does work reasonably well. It is thought to be part of what it means to be a professional.
Your spouse is a teacher? Hence the moniker? Rheeeely?
The headline should have read something like this:
“BAD TEACHERS? How Is It Possible That Certified Administrators Hired Them, Observed Them, Evaluated Them, Granted Them Tenure, and Then Refused To Counsel Them Out of Teaching”
“If I want to know anything, I’m not going to read Time magazine.” -Bob Dylan, 1965
True then, true now.
TAGO!
While there will always be the likes of “teachersspouse” making ill informed generalizations based on what is probably anecdotal second hand personal experiences, I’m sensing a slight swing in the pendulum. Time Magazine is a rag, and desperate. Its Michelle Rhee cover years ago gave it some much needed attention, but that was then. Its current piece is just more of the same but I’m sensing that as more has been revealed about the true motivations behind the “reform movement,” as more people see their OWN working conditions deteriorate and their wages stagnate, and as more parents become angry about their children being subjected to a test prep educational environment (and we teachers DO talk to parents…quite honestly about what is in and not in our control), the culture of “teacher bashing” becomes more unseemly. I think Time Magazine Time Magazine is more than a few steps behind actual opinion on these complex issues, and it will get blow back.
Of course, I only meant to write Time Magazine ONCE….it doesn’t even deserve that much mention. Apologies.
Just in time to lend help to a Missouri amendment on the ballot to end teacher tenure and base teacher pay on standardized tests. This effort is bought and paid for by a rich, tea party Missourian. Thanks Time magazine for weighing in and changing the dynamic of our election.
As a former elementary and high school principal in a right to work state (ARIZONA), I can say that I believe that teachers should get due process. The right of due process does not mean that a teacher cannot be fired. I would never want to fire a teacher because he/she disagreed with me. Think of teachers who see problems with Common Core. If they thought they would get fired, they would never point out problems to administrators. This would be the worst thing to happen. Teachers who cannot teach or who refuse to be coached about teaching strategies should be fired. Teachers who disagree about other matters should be listened to. Without tenure — or at the very least due process — we will lose the wisdom and advice of our best teachers.
Why are we stopping at an apology? Why not get it pulled from the newsstands? It worked when Rolling Stone tried to highlight the Boston Marathon bomber on its cover several years ago.
Wouldn’t this be akin to censorship? You may not agree with what Time says, but they have the right to say it.
To the Editors of Time Magazine:
“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.” – Malcolm X
I hope Malcolm X was wrong about media controlling ‘the minds of the masses,’ but the Time cover on teacher tenure with the phrase ‘Rotten Apples’ emblazoned across it shows that his other points were spot on. Irresponsible media can accuse with impunity, they can treat as hereos tech millionaires who lambast teachers by not only encouraging the use of, but use the courts to compel the use of techniques such as ‘Value-added measurement.’
Having written extensively on VAMs, I am aware of what a troubled and inaccurate method it is. I am not going to enter into all the reasons –I have a book about that–, but the “flood of new academic research on teacher quality” is dubious at best, deliberately misleading at times, often relying on a single study of a single school in a single year and then generalizing that to all schools everywhere in all years. Furthermore, this research is often miscategorized and misrepresented by advocates for a quick fix. But there is no quick fix – the problems of our schools are rooted in social pathologies, not teacher quality.
It is concentrated poverty, not teacher quality that plagues our system – or, more accurately, those parts of the system which serve the poorest quarter of our population. Even Eric Hanushek of Stanford, who is known for saying we need to “replace the bottom five to eight percent of our teachers in terms of effectiveness,” stresses that “an average teacher is quite good in our schools” and would rate well against teachers anywhere in the world. And almost no one suggests what seems obvious – that tenure draws people into the teaching pool who might go elsewhere, thus very likely making the average teacher significantly better.
On the other side, the so-called fixes would make things worse, much worse. What none of the advocates admit is this: it narrows the curriculum. The ‘value’ measured is not that that of character or creativity, but is based on standardized tests and how students perform on them. It has nothing to do with their dreams or aspirations, on their unique gifts or their personal histories and, as one might expect, since the advent of high stakes tests in the early 1990s, young people have had documented declines in creativity. Administrators and teachers are pressured to teach students to do well on the short list of skills the tests measure, not on how to have a meaningful life.
Those tests are themselves narrow in many ways, but in one way they are not: they are sweeping in their ability to make money. Pearson education has a nearly half a billion dollar contract to provide testing services in Texas. As for venture capitalists, the money has gone up 30-fold, from $13 million in 2005 to $389 million in 2011. As former Massachusetts Governor William Weld said some years ago, the “fundamentals are all aligned for a great number of people to make a whole lot of money in this sector.”
Weld finished his statement, “and do well by doing good.” That is always the claim. Dismantle the public system to serve the students. This is done in the strangest way — teacher autonomy declines and long term professionals are pushed out not because they are ‘bad,’ but because they have higher salaries. The problem is that far too many advocates of this position are trying to make room in the budget for their own payments; ranging from Rupert Murdoch to purveyors of virtual education to TFA to Pearson to the Gates-funded, Michelle Rhee-founded organizations the New Teacher Project, have an interest, financial and professional, in labeling the system as failing.
Add to this those with political interests to do the same, from the Bushes to Chris Christie to Scott Walker to Kevin Johnson, and you have a potent force able to craft messages that are in their own interests, but not those of a democratic nation the most important foundation of which is its public education system.
Sincerely,
Brian Ford
Sources:
First, my own book, Brian Ford, Respect For Teachers or The Rhetoric Gap and How Research on Schools is Laying the Ground for New Business Models in Education, Rowman and Littlefield, 2012.
Eric Hanushek speaking, “Class Size and Student Achievement,” Diane Rehm Show, 8 March 2011; accessed June 2011 at http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-03-08/class-size-and-student-achievement.
Luke Quinton & Kate Mcgee, “What’s in Texas’ $500 Million Testing Contract with Pearson?” KUT.ORG News, Austin, Texas, July 16, 2013; accessed October 2014 at http://kut.org/post/what-s-texas-500-million-testing-contract-pearson.
Stephanie Simon,”Private firms eyeing profits from U.S. public schools,” Reuters, New York, 2 August 2012; accessed October 2014 at http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/02/usa-education-investment-idUSL2E8J15FR20120802
Kyung Hee Kim, “The Creativity Crisis: The Decrease in Creative Thinking Scores on the Torrance
Tests of Creative Thinking,” Creativity Research Journal, 2011, Vol. 23:4, pp. 285-295.
Weld quote was from Walsh, Ed Week, 19 Jan 2000, p. 13
I am dropping ALL Time-Warner related products will. While EVERY profession has people who do not do as good a job as they should, the teaching profession has become a whipping boy in recent years. I have become weary of how thankless the job has become. I have no idea how I still have passion for teaching but I am thankful that I do. I want the next writer itching to cast a stone at teachers to spent one day shadowing me in my classroom.
Brian Ford,
May I add one small point to your cogent argument? Veteran teachers argue with administrators about the curriculum. TFA and inexperienced teachers are far more compliant. Veteran teachers oppose scripted teaching materials and would prefer to utilize their well honed skills.
Ya think? It is two decades now since they discovered the simple expedient for selling any thing they wished… get rid of the professional voice… and they had a process which worked. Now 20 years later, it is still working because the terrible trauma to the hundred thousand veteran teachers they sent packing with no recourse to the law, is still unknown.
Of course they could not tell an authentic educator what to do in there /his practice.
What hospital director would mandate procedures to a doctor if they would hurt the patients…but Teachers… why they are mere civil servants. The media did the job for 20 years… and the Time Magazine cover shows that they are still at it.
This is the how they do it:
http://www.speakingasateacher.com/SPEAKING_AS_A_TEACHER/No_Constitutional_Rights-_A_hidden_scandal_of_National_Proportion.html
The so-called reformers are out to destroy public education by attacking teachers and their unions. Imposing the “business model” on education will result in less pay for teachers, more pay for administrators, less input from teachers into the educational process. This will not bring “the best and the brightest” into the teaching profession. What these reformers are after is the money that now goes into education, and privatizing will give them access to it. If they succeed, they will ruin what was once a great educational system.
I used my rights under the Sunshine Law in Florida to view every teacher evaluation at my school last year. What I found was an inverse relationship between performance (VAM) and the evaluation of the teacher done by an administrator. Each count for 50% of the overall evaluation of teachers. Administrators like teachers who never write a disciplinary referral or give Ds or Fs, hence no parent complaints. However, strict teachers get results. Tenure relieves me of administrator pressure to ignore bully students, inflate grades and ignore laws.
Another moment of shameless commerce by the media—how utterly pathetic the editors of this rag are to have to resort to yellow journalism to sell more copies! Aren’t there “bad apples” in every profession? Or are we living in some sort of Utopia. Let the billionaires spend a week in an inner city classroom for a taste of realty!
“And when we work together, we can also change tenure to make it what it was supposed to be—a fair shake before you are fired, not a job for life, an excuse for administrators not to manage or a cloak for incompetence.” …..Randi Weingarten
Looks like the AFT president agrees that there is a problem with teacher tenure.
I am a teacher…and no matter what this magazine has to say, I love my job, I love my students, and no body is going to make me feel that I don’t do my job 100%. I would walk infront of a bullet or shield my students with my body in sever weather. I am a teacher….I don’t need a big pay check. I am rewarded every day by the smiles on my kidos faces. I am a teacher…. I am proud of my work, I am proud of my families, and I am proud of my students. So this article, whatever it will say, will not change who I am…I am a teacher. And A darn good one too!
You sound like me, like all of us who go into this profession. They know that!
What this article means, is that the conspiracy to paint teachers as the problem continues. It is their kind of rhetoric which means that your dedication and talent will mean nothing when they decide your salary is to o high, and they got some inexpensive TFA movie in the wings. Check out my resume, http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
I was celebrated and famous.
… and realize that it meant nothing when they wanted me gone because due process does not exist for teachers. THIS is the process
http://www.speakingasateacher.com/SPEAKING_AS_A_TEACHER/No_Constitutional_Rights-_A_hidden_scandal_of_National_Proportion.html
You have to admit that results in student testing and school evaluations are most directly correlated to zip codes. On any given day….If the State Superintendent doesn’t show up – no big deal. If anybody else employed by the school system doesn’t show up – no big deal. If a teacher doesn’t show up – it’s chaos ! You talk real tough until you step into the classroom….alone. I double dog dare ya’!
Everybody UNsubscribe from TIME.
IT IS HIGH TIME FOR TEACHERS TO BLAME THE FORMAL SYSTEM OF EDUCATION IMPOSED BY POLITICIANS , WHEREBY A LOT OF PEDAGOGICAL DISTRACTION IS INTRODUCED IN THE SYSTEM TO MAKE HAPPY KIDS WITHOUT FORSEEING THE CONSEQUENCES LATER ON THE STUDENT LIFE .,, MANY BECOMES PARASITES TOWARDS THEIR PARENTS , BELIEVING THAT LIFE IS ROSY , THE FORMAL SYSTEM ALSO MAKES OUT STUDENTS BECOME LAZY DISCO MINDID PEOPLE ………. WE HAVE MORE ON IT ON THE GROUP “”Education Problems “” ON FACEBOOK ALSO WE HAVE A GROUP “”””Teachers Problems”””” . PLEASE CHECK THE LONG PIN POST AND REACT . . .
CHRISTIAN YOW SANG
TEACHER SINCE 1991 OF STUDENTS AGE 6 TO 12 YEARS OLD
MAURITIUS ISLAND
INDIAN OCEAN
What does TIME Magazine mean by “bad”? Why use such an elusive, subjective term? Do they mean teachers who don’t care about students? Teachers who verbally or otherwise abuse children? No, the truth is that corporate reformers intend to label teachers as good or bad – or effective or ineffective as they sometimes prefer – based on high stakes testing results. They know, however, that parents have had their fill of high stakes testing and are ready to throw it out on its ear. If they specifically link “bad” to high stakes testing, they know that public disdain will be redirected toward them, and if that were to happen, where would the multibillion dollar testing industry be? So…. they prefer to stick with the emotionally charged but vague “bad.” It’s better for profits. See http://lisamyers.org/ for full post.
So, i recently read your article waiting to see when you would decide to discuss the topic at hand. Not the cover of the Time article but the topic of “Bad Teachers” which you clearly avoiding when you decided to type and publish this blog post. Also why is it that you stated that ” In fact, there is a strong correlation between states with strong teacher tenure and high student performance” but yet in Newark, New Jersey school district which in fact has one of the strongest teacher tenure. With them only fire 1 out of every 300,000 teacher with tenure that the school’s graduation rate is at a laughable 30.6%. And i’m pretty sure if these tech millions who according to you “don’t know anything about teaching students” where to withdraw the copious amount of money that they’re donating to these schools many of these teachers and AFT representatives would be out of a job because the school has no funds. Also if america’s teachers are doing such a bang up job why United States rank twenty-fourth out of sixty-five educational system and 17 in educational performance.
Also if the AFT and teachers are so dedicated to “educating” their students why aren’t these teachers doing their jobs and why does it cost close to $300,000 in legal fees alone to fire a bad teacher. Why didn’t you discuss the amount of money that it cost to fire a bad teacher. If you guys were so concerned with America’s youths, i’m pretty sure The AFT wouldn’t draw out these court dates and trials for months costing the school system even more money. Which in fact could be used to get supplies and other materials that these schools desperately need. If these teachers are such amazing teachers and victims then why did 47% of your union members state that tenure makes it so hard to get of the mediocre and incompetent teachers. Why did 78% of teachers say that many of their coworkers fails at doing a good job.
When you included in your article “And when we work together, we can also change tenure to make it what it was supposed to be—a fair shake before you are fired, not a job for life, an excuse for administrators not to manage or a cloak for incompetence.” Who was the we that you were referring to, the students, the tech millions who you so blatantly insulted and because of your dedication to tenure even going as far as to calling it a teacher’s protection. One would assume that it was already what is first intended. What do you define as a bad teacher, because if a teacher has so many excuses as to why their students are performing at a satisfactory level or even a level reflecting their amazing teaching who is benefiting from their teaching. Certainly not the students that they are so determined to “educate”. So in your opinion and with the student’s best interest should these individuals who fall under the category as a bad teacher be fired? If so explain your reasoning and give points supporting you argument
If you so happen to view this comment and decide to reply to it please answer and explain every point that i addressed in this comment without skipping over a single one like how you skipped over all of the points of the Time article. Those points and questions are just so you don’t get confused this time:
1. Should Bad Teacher be fired
2.What is defined as a “Bad Teacher”
3. Is there actually a strong correlation between strong teacher tenure and higher graduation rate and standardized score (also please not that the SAT and PSAT are in fact standardized test that determine various aspects in a student’s future.
4. If teacher tenure is not what it was intended what is it now and why don’t you as well as others AFT members try to change it back to what it is suppose to be.
5. Why is it that it takes so long and cost such copious amounts of money when it comes to firing a teacher who is protected by tenure?
6.Why does AFT and most of the teachers that your organization represent actually care about student education?
7. Does AFT donate any of the money earned from these cases to purchase and donate the necessary supplies for schools.
8. Why is it that you have decided to avoid the topic of bad teachers
9.And based off of the definition of the word sensationalize, isn’t your article doing the exact same deed that you accused time of doing because you failed to discuss the various topics that the article in Time magazine in fact talks about?
Also please excuse the various spelling and grammatical errors.
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