A reader gives her view of what it means to be a “highly qualified teacher,” if not by the elastic definition in NCLB, then by her own knowledge of teaching:
| As many have pointed out, no new teachers are “highly qualified.” While some new teachers may be more prepared than others, many years of teaching experience is necessary to become a truly effective (and therefore highly qualified) teacher. So not only are TFA teachers certainly not highly qualified, they are not even very well prepared. While some of them may have strong academic backgrounds and lots of motivation, why is that enough? Shouldn’t we demand that the people who teach our own children not only have strong academic backgrounds, but also strong backgrounds in education? I graduated with a bachelor’s in science from one of the top universities in the country, taught college students there for a year, got my master’s degree in education there (one of the top teacher prep programs), have the benefits and support of three teaching fellowships that constantly push me to be a better teacher, and I still know that, going in to my 3rd year of teaching, while I am doing a good job, I have a long ways to go to be a truly transformational teacher for all of my students. And I want my own children to have nothing less than that. Why is it okay to concentrate inexperienced teachers in high poverty districts when that would not be acceptable elsewhere? |
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As a veteran teacher whenever I hear this sort of tommyrot about how effective new teachers are, (and without doubt some of them are), it brings to mind one of my favorite motion pictures, “The Wizard of Oz.”
When the Wizard gives the Tin Man a heart and he counsels him, “And remember my galvanized friend, a heart is not judge by how much YOU love, but how much you are loved by others.”
Consequently, “A teacher is not judged by how much YOU know, but by how much you can teach what you know to others.”
“Tommyrot”, that’s a good one. Hadn’t seen nor heard it before and had to look it up and it meant what I thought it would mean. From Webster Dictionary online and there’s more good ones in the synonyms, codswallop or humbuggery-the Brits have a way with English words-I wonder why.
Definition of TOMMYROT
: utter foolishness or nonsense
Examples of TOMMYROT
Origin of TOMMYROT
English dialect tommy fool + English rot
First Known Use: 1884
Related to TOMMYROT
Synonyms: applesauce [slang], balderdash, baloney (also boloney), beans, bilge, blah (also blah-blah), blarney, blather, blatherskite, blither, bosh, bull [slang], bunk, bunkum (or buncombe), claptrap, codswallop [British], crapola [slang], crock, drivel, drool, fiddle, fiddle-faddle, fiddlesticks, flannel [British], flapdoodle, folderol (also falderal), folly, foolishness, fudge, garbage, guff, hogwash, hokeypokey, hokum, hoodoo, hooey, horsefeathers [slang], humbug, humbuggery, jazz, malarkey (also malarky), moonshine, muck, nerts [slang], nuts, piffle, poppycock, punk, rot, rubbish, senselessness, silliness, slush, stupidity, taradiddle (or tarradiddle), nonsense, tosh, trash, trumpery, twaddle
Actually claptrap, flapdoodle and twaddle are more along the connotation I was thinking.
What about the paraphrase of the famous movie line?
Famous movie line? You got me there. I’ve never been much of a movie fan. The last movie I saw at a theatre was “Chicken Run” when my youngest was five and he’s now twenty. Don’t get me wrong I’ve nothing against movies and have seen quite a few and have my favorites.
Can you give me a hint?
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious??
Evidently TFA is highly qualified according to Congress for another two years.
A U.S. House appropriations subcommittee approved legislation on Wednesday that extended for two more years the federal definition of a highly qualified teacher as including students still learning to be teachers and other people with very little training.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/does-5-weeks-of-training-make-a-teacher-highly-qualified-house-panel-to-vote/2012/07/17/gJQARodPsW_blog.html
When NCLB was initially authorized, I witnessed its terrible impact on students when the tribal elders who taught language and culture at our school were no longer “highly qualified” paraprofessionals. My digital story tells the tale:
Read this for the qualities of what a REAL highly qualified teacher has:
http://www.laprogressive.com/retired-teacher-speaks-out/
Wonderful.
Yes, that is a very wonderful read. Sent it out to our SOS Missouri group. Thanks!
Love, love, love it! Send it to everyone!
I’m sorry, but I meet these new teachers who have these supposed masters and various credentials and watch in disbelief as to how ill educated and ill prepared some of them are. I heard a kindergarten teacher teach her class that the sound of the letter “R” is /er/ and I almost fell off my chair. It’s good they have returned to teaching a little more phonics, but not if you don’t know what you are doing! Then she got all bent out of shape when the first child read “run” as /er-un/! And she now thinks they gave her the “slow” group! You bet after a year with her they will be the group that is behind everyone else!
I also watched a fifth grade teacher teach a basic law of science which she clearly did not understand herself. The real problem being that she did not know she didn’t understand it and she was teaching like she knew it inside and out and giving examples that did not remotely relate to it. To top it off, she very publicly admonished students who weren’t getting her convoluted non-sense.
We are not going to see many extremely bright intelligent people go into teaching. They will take anyone into that program now to keep the surplus up. My blood boils when I think of the bright and talented teachers our children will never see again.
I can remember when NCLB first came into effect. As a Latin teacher with an MA +45 in Classical Studies, I was suddenly not highly qualified to teach Greek Mythology. That class was offered through the English department, and I do not have an English degree.
However, because I have a Bachelor’s degree in History, I was considered highly qualified to teach things like Psychology or Economics, subjects about which I know next to nothing.
Talk about tommyrot!
Too bad I wasted all of those years learning my subjects and earning credentials when I could have been highly qualified to teach every subject to every grade level in a mere five weeks.
Funny, but true and how pathetic is that? I think they have all lost their minds. It shows you how easily our elected officials can be influenced. They don’t even know what to ask or what they don’t know, so they know what to ask. I feel at times that this is close to hopeless, but we can’t give up.
The fact is you have to start at the beginning, and thanks to the requirements of NCLB, you have to be “highly qualified” to be in the classroom. A newly-minted teacher who has a credential in the area he or she teaches is “highly qualified” in the definition provided by NCLB. What kills me about “highly qualified,” though, is you can be an experienced teacher going into another state and unless you pass their idiotic exams if you haven’t taught x number of years in a single subject area, you are NOT “highly qualified” but the newbie teacher with the state certification is. Our wonderful politicians in Washington didn’t even stop to consider the problems facing teachers who move to different states from the states in which they got their licenses.
I think weeding out the highly educated and highly experienced teachers was the exact point of the HQ regs; they knew exactly what they were doing. Experienced teachers with masters were all of a sudden no longer certified to teach in the area of their degrees in which they had been teaching for years.
When certain growing areas of the country, especially the south, put out news releases that they could not find highly qualified teachers, the public had no idea that “highly qualified” was per NCLB definitions. People simply thought there was a shortage of good teachers! When excellent teachers were being laid off in hard hit northern states and they tried to move down south to teach they could not get jobs because they were not qualified per NCLB. This glitch was not an oversight, it was a deliberate effort to destroy the foundation of the existing educational environment.
Oh yeah, they quickly put the best teachers out to pasture to make way for a whole population of inexperienced teachers and leaving no mentors or role models to help guide them. What ensued was chaos.