A 16-year teacher wrote to say he had just completed his professional development course for the Common Core.
He got a certificate “honoring” him for having done so. It was co-signed by someone from the New York City Department of Education and someone from “Pearson/America’s Choice.”
Why a private vendor that is making a profit selling this stuff should sign the certificate is beyond my understanding.
But here’s the context: This teacher has a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in history. He taught history and social studies in a large high school that the Bloomberg administration closed down and replaced with five small schools. Most of the veteran teachers don’t have jobs anymore; instead they were placed into the Absent Teacher Reserve, which means they float from school to school for a week at each school, like permanent substitutes.
So, to add to the indignity of losing his school, losing his position, and losing his colleagues, this teacher now has the honor of a certificate congratulating him for having mastered the Common Core learning standards, co-signed by the vendor.
What kind of a world is this? Maybe that should be the title of my blog, because I ask that question almost daily, it seems.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is a world turned upside down. Why do I think that this is all connected to Citizens United.
Because, pfj64, you are one smart cookie!
A truly amazing world. One where politicians can make things up things, hold hearings and proclaim they’ve found the truth.
It’s a world in which anyone without money does not matter, should shut up and go away. It reminds me of all the stories I heard as a tyke about the old Soviet Union: there was an accepted and official truth, never mind that it was idiocy and anybody who thought any differently was. not. heard. End of story (well, they haven’t sent us to Siberia. Yet.). And here we are, a world where people with money make policy to benefit (in most cases) themselves, and teachers are considered compromised by their meager salaries. Oh yeah, something is certainly amiss.
Shreveport Times June 29, 2012
Written by
John Andrew Prime
Linwood Public Charter School has announced it will open its doors to at least 60 more students this year, raising its fall enrollment target from the current 460 students to 520, officials said Thursday
“We are very proud of our students for their hard work and efforts,” Principal Vickie Carroll said. Also, he said, “we are not obliged to keep any teacher who does not get results. That’s a big difference. We can thin the herd.”
Yep, that’s us, just a big old herd of teachers who need roped and thin’in” like we are old and useless and have no value! Only the prize heifers will be kept!
Oh! Wait! I thought this was just a horrible analogy, it is actually a philosophy!
Soylent green hamburger value????
Oh goodness no that would be way too high, it’s straight to the rendering plant with the weak and infirm. I am stocking up on strawberry jam!
The pink slime we know as education reform… not so transformative, after all.
What the heck does she call the students in her school if she refers to teachers as being members of a herd? Does she have a branding iron ready when she prods them out the door? Any teacher that works for her knowing this is how she feels towards teachers has no pride in themselves or their profession. How utterly disgusting!
Kathy,
Exactly! Most folks just let it go, sort of like it used to be with sexual harassment, if you try and politely call him on it you get shouted down, “Oh, he don’t mean no harm. It’s just a saying he uses! You’re just too sensitive!”
You want to say, “No, you are too naive or have never really understood the problem.!”
I just started reading “Choice Words” by Peter Johnston. All teachers have heard been told “The words you speak to a child may be the only kind words they hear all day”.
It also applies to teachers! I watch politicians get in trouble and have their verbiage picked apart and then they publicly apologize. We need to be just as careful and specific when we talk about ourselves or about teaching. I have peers who I have heard reply when asked what they do, “I’m just a teacher.” We need to say we are a teacher with the pride we feel even if everyone around is not giving us praise.
Because we need to be careful about the words we use to and about each other, they may be the only nice ones we hear all day!
Are you sure that it’s not “udderly disgusting”?
“What kind of a world is this?”
It’s not a binary world.
From a naturalistic perspective it’s not kind or unkind.
We’re creating it blink by blink.
I, too, have been teaching for 16 years. I started teaching as a third career, probably because I wanted an insider’s perspective for my special ed. son. (Thank God he has graduated). When I first started teaching, Howard Gardner’s concept of multiple intelligences was poised to transform education. Every year, however, has been a reform year. Though the word reform implies a process that is constructive and additive — a re-shaping that will result in a better outcome for all the stakeholders, it has devolved. Education reform (policy) in many cases can be characterized by schismogenesis and perverse incentive.
I guess it’s a bait-and-switch tactic. Even when I was starting out as a teacher a friend of mine working for a large financial services corporation told me that corporations didn’t want creative thinkers and problem solvers; they wanted cubicle-dwelling corporate clones.
At the end of the day it’s about stories and relationships…. the Common Core is the new rhetorical device.
I like the question but what kind of rubric will be used to score my response? Persuasive? Reflective? Response to Lit.?
How about a weatherman rubric — mostly sunny with a chance of scattered showers and rainbows?
We are living in Orwellian times and I suggest that everyone read 1984 again; this time as an adult.
This is just so sad, so sad!
Crony capitalism. It’s how Obama operates
To Confused….I hear too often when I’m visiting schools, “I’m just an aide.” I’m just a sub.” I’m just a parent.” I immediately attempt to correct them and remind them how important they are to the school family. BTW, I located the story. The money the board president anticipates to be added to the schools budget is coming in the form of vouchers and this will deplete the coffers for the traditional public schools in Caddo Parish. All to the almighty Gov Bobby Jindal. Three lawsuits have been filed. the temperatures in Louisiana are not the only thing that’s hot!
They never use his given first name just his nickname, I would think that on occasion they would have to use his legal name but I guess Bobby seems less threatening. It is odd when I hear people openly hating minorities yet love him. One women said he is just deeply tanned!?!
Wikipedia:
“Jindal’s nickname dates to his childhood identification with a sitcom character. He has said, “Every day after school, I’d come home and I’d watch The Brady Bunch. And I identified with Bobby, you know? He was about my age, and ‘Bobby’ stuck.”[137] He has been known by his nickname ever since, though his legal name remains Piyush Jindal”
The biggest disrespect is coming from our own unions. Last night there was a minor war on Twitter. Teachers were questioning Randi Weingarten as to why she now thinks teachers should have a bar exam. Her reasoning seems to be that their would be that teachers would get professional respect if we had such exams. Teachers were absolutely livid. Many were stating that they felt she was completely out of touch, that teachers are sick of being the ones that need fixing, and that Randi was engaging in the very abuse that teachers feel from corporate reform.
Randi maintained that Finland has high entrance standards, and the bar would align us better with this way of thinking. Leonie Haimson made the excellent point that the excellent Finnish teachers would not be deemed any more excellent within this system than our American teachers. they would be judged on student’s test scores, they would work in over-crowded classrooms, they would have zero resources and time, and they would be bashed each and everyday, the same way we are.
The AFT and NEA are complicit in putting teachers in the position we are in. It’s really and understatement to point this out. That the head of the AFT is focusing her attention on our credentials and not Pearson’s hostile takeover of the curriculum, or Gates’ meddling, and so much more, is depressing, disheartening, and disrespectful.
Even more shocking is that Randi seems to be OK with TFA in our schools, yet she wants career teachers to take a “bar exam”.
TeacherOut,
I totally understand where the idea of a board exam would be overwhelming, however just let me add this thought. Years ago RNs when through a similar fight to establish ourselves as valuable highly educated professionals. If you know any RNs who were practicing in the late 70’s ask them what happened, it is like deja vu with teachers now. even though the idea of something else teachers have to do to make people respect us is abhorrent it maybe that all of us need to look at other professions and see why they are respected and we aren’t. I feel, and this is just my opinion, that we are disrespected because the public has no clue as to what teachers do AND because we have not taken control of policing our own ranks.
Give me a minute before everyone jumps on me (I can hear the inhaling that comes before shouting) RNs had the same problem with how we handled bad nurses. They would hide them in the nursery or quietly let them leave and often keep their license. No one wanted to be the bad guy and fire them or take away their license. We were angels in white darn it and didn’t people know we care?? As healthcare liability increased, and it was our own fault for not taking control sooner, RNs became the new scapegoat for all the mistakes in hospitals. Doctors called all the shots for nurses and many thought of us as handmaidens, not peers. We had to take control of our profession, IT WAS HORRIBLE, and the infighting and anguish we went through was exhausting. We decided WE had to turn in impaired providers, we had to report drug mistakes and poor patient outcomes. We were the best ones to decide what was good nursing care and to evaluate the practice of those newly graduated or accused of substandard practice. We had long fights and battles over the right and wrong ways to do everything AND we had to find the research to back it up and keep doing the research on improving our practice. I remember having people spit on me and through things at me when we went on strike. But we persevered and, while there is still work to be done the transformation in nursing was wonderful and worth the battles.
Educators need to take control of public education ourselves, if not someone will do it for us, they are trying to do it now. If our so called unions are not doing what we need then they need to hear from us or we get new ones. We need teacher attorneys to be as common as nursing malpractice attorneys are now, we need to write our own press and be honest that there is an entire herd of elephants in the room no one wants to talk about. WE need to define and quantify and qualify what excellence in teaching is.
Thanks for hearing me out.
Woman no longer went into nursing after the seventies, and so there became a massive shortage that continues today. Nursing salaries rose because of this shortage, and the overall rise of healthcare costs. Women who were inclined to go into medicine became doctors instead.
Nurses didn’t get respect because they turned in their colleagues. full stop.
I have been teaching twenty-eight years, have two MA’s, one in English and one in history, and abd for my PhD in English from a prestiges university, and have no problem with taking exams or maintaining my teaching creditials in history/English, having earned a triple major for my BA. I am not an exception in my district, where we all must have an MA or a 30 credit equivalent.
We are given no respect, not because we are infested with bad teachers and need to turn in our colleagues, but because we are at war with those who wish to privatize our profession and make vast amounts of money. The meme of the bad teacher is simply their weapon of chance.
I had a front row seat to what happened with nurses in MO in the 70s and 80s as my wife at the time was a BSN who worked with the MO Nurses Association. I never heard that the battle was “getting rid of the bad nurses”. If there was a “bad” nurse then it should have been up to the nursing administration in whatever setting, hospital, clinic, etc. . . to counsel, discipline, and report if necessary any “bad” nurses. But it wouldn’t have been the shift nurses responsibility to do so.
The problem I see with your argument is that it is not the teachers’ responsibility to evaluate other teachers. Now, I’ve not known a teacher who wouldn’t help other teachers out as needed but to say that it is our responsibility is just wrong, unless, let’s say, a teacher is a department chair or has the legal mandate to evaluate other teachers.
It is the administrator’s fault if a less than adequate teacher continues in a position. Your argument falls into the educational deformers position as it is stated-“Oh, look we (teachers) don’t do enough to “police”/evaluate our peers-we need to be more “professional”. Hogwash! That’s another of the ed deformers memes that are out there. Combat it, fight it but don’t repeat it and lend credence to it because it is false.
The last paragraph says it all.
I hate that my iPad won’t allow me to edit text. Sorry for the jumbled writing in the first paragraph, I couldn’t re-read it, it was covered:(
Not a problem for me, I often look like I am typing in another language. When we get excited and passionate about what we are trying to communicate it happens. I do spell check but I need a Brain Check button instead. Not having my occasional typos picked apart is nice. Like my through instead of throw up above. Sigh….
I did not mean to imply that turning in my peers was the only reason for respect. I was trying to explain that we had to recognize that we had nurses who had problems, sometimes dangerous ones, and no one wanted to deal with the heart wrenching task of preventing them from being a danger to themselves and our patients. It is impossible for me to explain the trials and changes nursing went through but I was involved and my experience anyway leads me to see many similarities with teaching today. Having been there during those times I was making the point that we had to take care of our own profession and dealing with bad nurses or bad teachers it is the same behavior, taking responsibility for how we take of our business. What was a “good nurse?” is like trying to describe a good teacher. We couldn’t and realized we had to have a way of measuring and defining what we did. The shortage of RNs began long before women had the option of entering other normally male dominated careers. This definitely contributed to the increase in pay as heath-care agencies competed for RNs, the time period I am talking about when nursing stood up for itself was in the late 70s and early 80s. The nursing shortage became a major talking point in the 90’s. Women do choose other careers but that alone doesn’t account for the total scarcity of professional RNs. We still have a shortage of men entering nursing just as we have a shortage in teaching even though the pay is much better.
The issues nationally regarding teachers initially was the assaults on unions and the major arguments were there was no way to get rid of bad teachers and unions protected them. We all know truly ineffective teachers and often just accept that until they do something really terrible we just have to put up with them. We see great teachers who disagree with administration or run afoul of a famous parent and find themselves getting the option to move resign or be fired. Neither of these situations should happen.
I too have multiple majors and will finish my second masters degree next summer and will enter a new EdD program next year, however where I am this counts for little. Our evaluations for value added to not include content knowledge. My completed masters degree counts for nothing since it is not in education. Everyone gets a masters in Educational Leadership so we have tons of future principals but few with advanced degrees in what they teach. I was also trying to make this point; that the education required to become a teacher and the diverse degrees and experiences across the nation makes it vague to others what is valued by teachers and what should be valued by the public. There is a war on and we are far behind in facing it.
I guess Goofy and Daffy were not available to sign this nonsense! Who else could be found to certify anything in Pearson’s made-up world of education reform?
I have already told my admin that one more Pearson in-service may be the incentive I need to walk away from education! And I shuddered when I saw “America’s Choice” added to the Pearson tag. That was such a nightmare time for my district. In retrospect, I guess that time was the beginning of the end.
Duane,
I am trying to explain my experiences and perspectives and am really searching for the words. I read in many teacher blogs and various websites that not everyone has administrators who are out and about and many teachers express their opinion that just because someone is in administration doesn’t necessarily mean they are good at it. They do not see everything and sometimes they don’t want to see. My example of reporting impaired nurses I suppose was picked because that was just one of the most difficult tasks a profession does. I also suppose that the difference is that in healthcare we were responsible for protecting patients and if we witnessed potentially dangerous behavior and no one else did we had a procedure for dealing with it. We couldn’t wait for administration to see the problem because they probably never would, they were 7 floors down and not there at night. RNs are responsible for this. Scroll to the bottom of this and look through the references. I am not saying that the only problems teachers get into involve drugs and alcohol, I am saying that this is just one of the more serious issues and it is an issue in teaching for some.
The impaired nurse: Would you know what to do if you suspected substance abuse?
Issue Date: August 2011 Vol. 6 No. 8
Author: Cynthia M. Thomas, EdD, RNC, CDONA, and Debra Siela, PhD, CCNS, ACNS-BC, CCRN, CNE, RRT .
Teachers have responsibility to report signs of abuse or neglect we see in students that we see and others may not. Most teachers have seen peers who are impaired(to use the healthcare term since their isn’t one yet other then ineffective which is bogus)
Teachers evaluate each other all the time, as mentors, as peers, as cross curriculum exchanges or vertical planning. Just not in the same sense of the word evaluation that a principal does. I see this as part of the professionalism of teaching. Helping each other, establishing standards for behavior as a profession and inviting feedback and guidance. Every school I have worked at has teachers who break the rules, do not do what is expected, and some whose behavior is really not helping the image of teachers. Everyone knows all about this and no one does anything because in the current systems common in many schools you are the bad guy for saying anything. It is sort of an unwritten rule; If the principal doesn’t catch them we just stay out of it. This doesn’t lend to a professional environment in schools and students are affected since they often know more about what the teachers are or are not doing then the administration. The stereotypical comment of the teacher’s lounge being the place where gossip is traded and behavior is discussed is common for a reason. If a teacher is rated ineffective under the new value added mess I would want a panel of experienced educators to be the ones who decide what the circumstances were, could I have responded differently and recommend how the principal and superintendent should respond.(the school board no longer hears cases of teacher misconduct, it is the teacher, one person of his or her choice, the principal and the superintendent and another of the superintendent’s choice). I don’t want a business major making decisions on my classroom management issues or a principal who is never seen outside of the administration hall and hasn’t taught in 25 years.
The other need is a way for teachers to support peers who are being unjustly harassed or accused of being ineffective in an attempt to get rid of them. Plenty of great teachers are harassed by administrators who take a dislike to them for whatever reason and many times the rest of the teaching staff may offer support in private but actively voicing support is never done that I have seen. There is no process or avenue to say what is happening to an authority who can intervene, find out the issues and make it stop. There are plenty of books, articles and blogs about the great teachers who were driven out of a school and everyone just watched in silence. I would want the same panel as I mentioned above to be able to intervene or at least review and make recommendations. We need attorneys who have taught, just like nursing has attorneys who practiced before they entered law. Our professional organizations need to be coherent and organized and better able to anticipate the directions that politics and laws will take that apply to education. right now it seems like every state is for themselves(due to the frequent and ridiculous attacks) but somehow we have to organize nationally as well as at the state and local level.
This doesn’t make me a disformer and calling me such is being part of the problem. I was and am trying to say that taking responsibility for education and for the educators themselves in NOT just up to the administrators. They do not see everything, many do not have the experience or motivation to intervene and until there is a way to deal with these issues it is very difficult to work together and get us all to the place that our schools are a great place to work. I speak only from my experience and while different form yours that doesn’t make it wrong.