A reader comments on an earlier post written by a teacher who taught in Hartford:
I have seen this teacher’s story played out in so many schools in NYC.
She asks who will subject themselves to teaching in the most challenging of communities?
I often had that same concern. I agree. At a point in the not so distant future, teachers will be retiring and schools will need to staff the classes.
There will be teachers available to teach in high needs schools, but despite Mr. Duncan and others who claim the best and the brightest for every classroom, what I see happening is that many best and brightest will not enter education at all. The ones that do will have their choice of schools in which to teach and most likely most, although not all, will choose schools which may or may not have adequate resources but more importantly, respect and autonomy for teachers.
Those in the 2nd and 3rd tiers who can’t get jobs in desirable school districts will be assigned to high needs schools. Some will stay and improve their practice after a few years. Some will stay and go through the motions because no other job opportunities are on the horizon. Some will stay a short time and either find a way to go a “better” school district and/or change careers and leave teaching completely.
So in the end the children who need the best and brightest teachers (whatever that really means) will most likely have teachers who are there because there was no where else to go.
O. I forgot. The states will recruit teachers from other countries with promises of housing and support. When the teachers discover they’ve been hoodwinked, they will be on a return flight to their home country.
History repeating itself.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
ARe you under the false assumption that in the future, the best and the brightest will be needed to teach?? That’s what COMPUTERS are for. Teachers are now the facilitators of learning…aka…babysitters. Hasn’t anyone noticed that yet? This is a way to get rid of teachers.
We already have teachers being told they are to be GENERALISTS and NOT specialists.
We have teachers being told they are to facilitate learning and NOT instruct.
We have teachers being told that they are allowed to teach for no longer than 10 mins.
The goal is not to get highly educated or qualified teachers in the classroom.
The sooner we understand where they are driving this bus, the better.
NOW, the question is, will teachers allow the reformers to destroy public education in this way in order for them to FIX IT as they want it?
MomWithABrain, I think you are right on target about the big picture.
Corporate sponsored agitators don’t want skilled teachers employed full time at public schools anymore, when education can be cheaply outsourced to for-profit charters with computers and part time babysitters. That way, corporations can still create the compliant worker bees from impoverished urban and rural areas that they want to fill low paying jobs, and they can make profits while doing so.
Maybe causing an increased teacher shortage in the inner city would expedite their game plan.
I think the main reason why the narrative that has been pushed in the media is about “our nation’s failing schools”, rather than about the problem with high-poverty schools specifically, is because a country where just big cities outsource education to private for-profits looks bad. It looks like discrimination and segregation. Better to inflict this on the entire nation and avoid OCR complaints, while simultaneously increasing corporate profits.
What better reason would the Gates/Broad/Walton left-right alliance have for supporting ALEC legislation to decrease local control and eliminate elected school boards? They already have that in many mayoral controlled cities now. Why else are they pushing charters in higher income suburbs now? In 2009, 43% of the superintendents hired in big cities were Broad superintendents. To make the game plan work more quickly and efficiently, we are sure to soon see Broad superintendents in every area of the country.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/03/01/kappan_underwood.html
“In 2009, 43% of the superintendents hired in big cities were Broad superintendents.” Wow, that is a staggering figure, I had no idea that things were that bad and that was 3 year ago. Yikes.
Yeah, that is really scary. It shows how succesful corporations have been in encroaching on public education across the country. The details are in this article, Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools:
http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781
You catch on quick …
Welcome to the wonderful world of minimum wage switch-flippers.
Do you want Lard of the Fries with that?
Computers will never replace teachers for those who can afford teachers. It won’t happen for the children of the 1%. You are quite right. The drive for online instruction and virtual schools is two-fold: to replace teachers and drive down costs.
There are other reasons that you might support online instruction. Many of the public school districts in my state are tiny in enrollment but large in area. The only way to offer some courses at a reasonable cost is to do it on line. Flexability is also another virtue. The flexability of taking an online class offered my son the chance of a better high school education than he would otherwise have obtained.
In my case, I am returning back to the special education district of NYC, after teaching music education in different different districts around the city. I will be dealing with emotionally disturbed children and cognitively impaired children, but here is the thing. None of the students asked for their brains to be wired that way, or be given a world without structure due to lack of stable parenting. These students are the left sided “outliers” of the NYC student testing population and the DOE knows this. As a result, the special education students are getting a more balanced curriculum which includes, my subject-music, as well as art, dance, drama,physical education, etc.. because classroom teachers need thee preps, and they want the extra reading and math test prep resources to go to students who would show a “greater improvement” on those tests.
Please don’t misunderstand, test prep is also running rampant in specialmed, just not to the same degree as mainstream classes.
Momwithabrain makes a good argument for the need for teacher unions which will and do stand up to all the insane efforts of the so called reformists to privatize public education with tax dollars. That’s what unions are for, to level the playing field between all the billionaire reformers who want to turn teachers into temporary faciliators, to be employed for 3 or 5 years and then to be disposed of for a new crop of fresh faced sacrificial educational goats. And the neat part of being billionaire reformists is that if their plans fail abysmally, they won’t be blamed, they will just blame the teachers all over again. It’s a win win for people like Rhee, Joel Klein, Bill Gates and Eli Broad. Unions are definitely fighting back against the reformistas’ efforts to destroy education.
I agree with all the replies above, except I don’t agree that the teachers’ unions are doing much to stand up for teachers. Unions are not informing the public about the rise of charter schools, the unfairness of students’ test scores being such a large part of teachers’ evaluations, the reformers’ real agenda, etc. Our last teacher’s contract in 2005 gave us a “time for money” raise, which is not really a raise… It also weakened our tenure rights, (see the second link at the bottom of my reply below). Most of the teachers who work in “poor performing schools” in NYC are too afraid to speak up. Some administrators will actually write letters to a teacher’s file that are untrue, to build a case against a teacher. Union reps, many times, are trying to fly below a Principal’s radar themselves. Al Shanker is dead, and with him, I believe, the integrity of the UFT. Where are the full page ads informing the public of what’s really going on?! I don’t want to read about it the union paper, I want the WORLD to read it in the papers! Thank you, Diane Ravitch, and even Matt Damon 🙂 but the PUBLIC needs to know the back stories, not just us readers of blogs.
The link below confirms everything we thought: “The city’s Education Department now has a team that trains principals in gathering the kind of evidence needed to assess a teacher’s skills.”
(Instead, read “The city’s Education Lawyer Department now has a team that trains principals in gathering the kind of evidence needed to fill a teacher’s file to be used in a future 3020a hearing.”
In my opinion and experience, the general public doesn’t see what’s wrong with the educational climate because they are not really that interested. When they think of schools, they relate it to their own experiences growing up. They vaguely hear the media drumbeat that America’s schools need saving. No one, not even most teachers, is aware that this mantra is untrue, and just a way to end the teaching career as we know it.
People can’t fix what they don’t (won’t) see…
http://chaz11.blogspot.com/2008/04/unholy-alliance-between-doe-uft-has.html
I couldn’t agree with you more. While Rome is burning the AFT leadership is touting “solution driven unionism” and “sharemylesson,” while putting out minor grass fire with Campbell Brown on Twitter. I’m so disgusted.
Actually, I have been underwhelmed and disappointed by the near silence of the unions lately.
Those of us who started dreaming about the potential of information technology to promote public education and lifelong learning some — he computes — 50 years ago know that the dream has largely died outside of a few enlightened enclaves, that it has been bludgeoned to death by the very same forces that kill every other potential advance.
The question is not whether information technology could contribute to education, the question is who will control the technology, educators or hucksters?
We are seeing the answer today.
Hint. It’s that second thing.