Joe Bower, a terrific blogger and educator in Canada, noticed something odd in a report about new teachers who are staying longer. The teacher whose picture illustrated the report was a Teach for America recruit who didn’t stay. She taught for two years and quit.
Bower wrote:
“The article featured the picture to the right of Gabrielle Wooden. She taught in Mississippi for a whopping two years before quitting to become an account manager for Insight Global in St. Louis.
“Wooden belonged to Teach for America which is an organization that undermines children’s basic needs and is an accomplice to the corporate take over and privatization of public education.”
Peter Greene jumped on the story.
He writes:
“The Center for American Progress got another quick lesson in How the Internet Works. In their haste to prove that beginning teachers are sticking around for years and years (well, six years, anyway) they slapped up a lovely picture of a TFA temp who finished her two year stint and headed off to her real career in a corporate office. They helpfully included her name (Gabrielle Wooden) so that her actual job history could be found by anybody with an internet hookup and access to google. Joe Bower (in Canada) worked out this tricky research problem as well, and in the last fifteen hours a very long list have people have emailed and messaged me to join this particular swimming party in the warm waters of Lake Schadenfreude….”
“CAP raises a couple of legit concerns beyond the not-shocking news that media do not always report scientific research accurately.
“One is that the existing work on teacher retention is old, that we are talking about data from seven or eight years ago. Most importantly, we are not far enough down the road to see the effects of Common Core on the teacher force. Not to do obvious math here, but there’s no way to know what percentage of teachers are staying past five years when looking at teachers who entered the profession after 2009.
“Another is that this data can be highly local. My theory is that it’s even worse in the most teacher-hostile states. In North Carolina, a state that has gone out of its way to make teaching non-viable as a lifetime career, it would appear (via CAP) that a good local administration can make the difference between losing 10% or 20% of the teaching staff. When there’s a terrible storm blowing, what you do next depends a lot on whether you’re in a tumble-down shack or a solid brick structure. This is a problem with plenty of educational research and almost all education policy– every school is different in distinct and important ways (kind of like human children– go figure).”
Oh you fact checkers. The ed reform movement has never relied on facts, only the appearance of fact. Now that they have posted a picture of a leaver as a stayer, the leaver is now a stayer. It will be referenced by other non-factual ed reform touters. Remember, black is white, up is down, charters improve test scores, vouchers give parents a choice.
George Orwell, 1984: “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
Akla, please clear up the confusion: since self-styled “education reformers” engage non-stop in doublethink, does that make 1984 fiction or non-fiction informational text? The future of CCSS and its conjoined twin, high-stakes standardized tests, hang in the balance.
¿😧? I’m not going to like your answer?
You wouldn’t be kidding, now, even rheeally in the most Johnsonally sort of ways?
Ok, now I’m getting a bit uneasy…
😎
New genres being invented: non-fictional fiction, and fictional non-fiction.
title one texas teacher: some homegrown talent to clear up some of the confusion:
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” [Mark Twain]
I hope that helps…
😎
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
Joe Bower is well worth reading besides this article. He is an ardent proponent of doing away with grades for students. Here’s his reading list with his (and others’) arguments: http://www.joebower.org/p/abolishing-grading.html?m=1
Thanks for the link!
Will hand it (along with my Wilson summary) out to my “being professionally developed” group learning about SLOs and SGPs, etc. . . . meeting today after school. It certainly won’t be what the powers that be want to hear.
TFAers, so-called reformers in general and their media echo chambers never fail to hold fast to one of the basic principles of propaganda, as expressed by Ronald Reagan: “Facts are stupid things.”
Joe Bower is an international treasure whose blog I have appreciated for years; thanks for giving him props!